Make Three-Ingredient Fruit Rolls
In the great lunchbox snack trading game, few items have the same impact as hot pink or, if you’re really lucky, a fruit roll with dye. While I still have a soft spot for plastic confectionery, I wouldn’t include it in my five-day count. Luckily, you can get more fruit into your fruit snacks by making them yourself.
Get out those Trapper Keepers and sharpen your # 2 pencils – it’s a week back to school! Going far beyond the classroom, Lifehacker offers you ingenious tricks and ideas on how to get started on a chore, brush up on old skills, or learn something new this fall.
This recipe is from Food Network that requires:
- 1 1/4 lb chopped fruit
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1-2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
The idea is that you can take just about any fruit, rub it with sugar, add lemon juice to taste, and then boil it down to a thick fruit mixture. Then spread this mass in a thin layer on a sheet of parchment or silicone baking mat and dehydrate in an oven at 200 degrees until it can be peeled and cut into slices (about 3-4 hours).
It’s a fairly straightforward process, but there are some nuances that I grasped after creating a few batches:
Not all fruits will behave as expected.
Fruit is not a monolith, and different berries, apples and drupes contain different amounts of water, sugar and pectin. Although the aforementioned dragon fruit and peach mixture tasted delicious, the result was a very fluid mixture that required a much higher boil than other fruit configurations.
Conversely, blueberry-fig-balsamic turned into a gel-like gel in just half an hour of sitting on the countertop. (Yes, you read that right: I brilliantly swapped lemon juice for balsamic vinegar, and my life changed forever.) However, the strawberry-raspberry mixture – one pint of each berry – was a platonic ideal in terms of time and consistency.
Thai dye is not easy
If you want to use multiple tones, remember that you can’t just mix different flavors together and expect them all to dehydrate at the same rate. As you can see in the photo above, I tried to combine all three of my flavors into one colorful strip, but the difference in viscosity resulted in an uneven, lumpy curl, with some of the dragon fruit and peach segments just crumbling. touch. (It was still delicious though.)
Attract other members of your pantry
The fact that we make fruit snacks does not mean that we should be limited to fruits and vegetables only. As I mentioned earlier, balsamic vinegar has given my blueberry and fig rolls a pleasant, exquisite sourness, but almond extract, vanilla and even black pepper can transform a once favorite childhood staple into something distinctly ripe.
Once you’ve decided on your flavors and fruit ratio – start with a 50/50 mix of two fruits and adjust from there – just add 3/4 cup sugar, stir and simmer. Spread it out so that it is thin but not translucent, then dry it for three or more hours, until the top of the fruit rind is barely sticky to the touch. Let it cool, peel off any non-stick material you are using, and cut it into sheets or strips. Roll the pieces into parchment, tie it with a little tweed twine, and distribute it to your favorite students and adults.