Our temporary home has a big garden with several fruit trees in it (one of the reasons why we rented it). Currently it’s raining apples, but unfortunately the variety is not extremely tasty to eat just like that. Making and canning applesauce is a good option, but we don’t eat applesauce all that often. So I’ve taken to dehydrating the apples.
I own a Stöckli dehydrator which has a thermostat. It only came with three trays and currently that’s all I have. I got it second hand a few years ago by an Internet for €50. At that time the price for a new one would have been €139. I thought it was a bargain and actually the seller received better bids after he had agreed to sell it to me for the fixed price he had mentioned himself in the advertisement. Fortunately the seller kept to the agreement and I got my dehydrator.
Dehydrators run a great risk of ending up in a cupboard with a layer of dust on them. In fact I admit to having the thing collecting dust for about a year or so. At first I used it several times for apples, mushrooms and (delicious) jerky. However I got some conscience pangs about all the meat I was using up making these lovely jerky treats. It certainly was meat I would never have purchased otherwise and I did not buy organic meat, due to the cost. So for a while I really didn’t use the dehydrator all that often. I lent it to a friend, who used it extensively during last year’s apple season. My friend purchased her own dehydrator and is still dehydrating everything she can find. So this year I’m happily using my Stöckli once again.
With apples the procedure is very simple, really. You can peel the apples-I usually don’t-, core them and slice them in thin slices as evenly as you can. The slices should be about half a centimetre thick. If you make them much thicker it takes a long time to get them properly dehydrated. Anyway, put the slices in a single layer on a tray. The sides can touch, but the slices should not overlap. Fill as much trays as your dehydrator can comfortably handle and dehydrate on 70°C/160°F. It takes some eight hours for the slices to be leathery and a little longer for them to become crisp. If you Google you can find lots of information on the proper procedure for making sure your apples are dehydrated in such a way that you can store them for a long time. I might write a longer post one day about dehydrating fruit, but until then I would encourage you to do some clever searching on the web.
Once you’ve got loads of dehydrated apples, you need recipes to use them. I have started doing this by making muffins with rehydrated apples. They turned out really nice though the recipe still needs some tweaking.