Homemade Fruit Leather

I have had a few people ask me for this recipe, This is from Russ' mom who has been making this for many years, so I thought it would be fun to post it here. This is a main staple in our home, I make this recipe at least every other week! I use a food dehydrator to make this, but i know that their are ways to do it in your regular oven.

(I just noticed that you can get the exact food dehydrator that I have on cabelas.com for only 99.00! thats a great deal! it does alot more than just fruit leather)

For this specific batch, I used canned fruit, however, in the summer months I like to use fresh fruit or you can use a mixture of both.

My favorite combination is Peaches, Pears, Apricots and Applesauce.

You will need:

4 cans of peaches
1 can of pears
1 can of apricots
1 cup of applesauce

All of these ingredients, will fill one blender full. In order to make a entire batch to fill all 20 fruit leather trays, I need to do 3 blenderfuls.

Drain out the juices of the canned peaches, pears and apricots.

The key to getting a soft fruit leather that doesn't crack is the applesauce, I add one cup per every blender-full of fruit. (unless you cook it to long, than it will be hard and crack anyway!)

Place all the ingredients in the blender, and blend till all the fruit is made into a liquid form.

make sure you blend it enough, so that there aren't any chunks in the mixture.

Pour the mixture into the trays designated for your dehydrator. I spray a very thin coat of cooking spray on the trays before I pour the mixture on.

With the back of a spoon push the mixture to all the edges of the tray and spread it evenly across the tray to not allow and parts of the tray to show through.

Place the small fruit leather trays onto the trays that go in the food dehydrator. I can fit two fruit leather trays per one dehydrator tray.

Place all your prepared trays into the dehydrator. set the temperature to the manufactures recommended setting and wait... For my dehydrator, I have to leave mine for about 10 hours. (I set up the dehydrator out in the garage so I don't really have to think about it, or hear the machine running for that long)

Once the fruit leather is dry and not squishy to the touch, remove it from the dehydrator and peel it off of the tray. I then cut that strip into three smaller strips, that are a good snack size.

After I remove then from the trays and cut then into strips, I place them in a Ziploc bag to keep them soft. I really cant tell you how long they will last, because like I said, we go through a batch this size every other week!