Easy Strawberry Fruit Leather

The other day, a sweet friend dropped by with a sweet treat for the family…An entire large tray of strawberries (and raspberries)!  Now, the kids could have eaten that whole tray of berries in one day (and it was a lot of berries), but the timing of these strawberries was perfect for a tea party with a strawberry food theme.  I gave the kids a few carton of berries and got to work using the rest for fun party food.

One of the things I needed for the tea party was strawberry juice.  The end result of strawberry juice is strawberry pulp.  Not wanting to waste any part of the food, we fed the strawberry greens to the chickens and used the pulp to make some super simple, easy to make strawberry fruit leather.

Juicing the strawberries. After finishing the juicing, I removed the pulp from the grey reservoir to use in the fruit leather.

Strawberry juice and cut strawberries straight into the freezer to keep until the weekend for use in tea party foods.

To make the strawberry juice, I just ran lots of berries through our juicer.  I didn’t bother to hull the strawberries prior to juicing, but I did remove the greens simply by plucking them off.

After everything went through the juicer, I scraped the pulp out of the reservoir and dumped it into our food mill to help strain out the hulls and finish crushing the fruit.

Running the strawberry pulp through the food mill helped to thoroughly crush the fruit and remove the hulls.

Pulp after running it through the food mill.

From there, Pumpkin took over.  He lined one of our solar dehydrator trays with some aluminum foil (it was all we had on hand, but you could us waxed paper or the shiny side of freezer paper), and spread the pulp out on the tray in a nice, somewhat thick, even layer.

Pumpkin putting the pulp on the dehydrator tray.

Strawberry pulp, spread on dehydrator tray, lined with aluminum foil.

Then it was out to the solar dehydrator to put the tray in.  This was our first time using the dehydrator since last fall, but I’m glad I could finally pull it out again!  We were late in putting the pulp in the dehydrator for the day, but it could sit out overnight, so we decided to just let it be.

It ended up being humid, so we didn’t actually take the leather out until the third day (less than two days time in the dehydrator).

Day 2 in the dehydrator. It was mostly dry, but still a little mushy in spots.

You can see at the bottom left of the picture where I tested the fruit leather for done, but my finger pushed right through…still needing more time to dry.

I love it when making a snack for the kids is fast (well…not the drying, but making it) and easy!  The kids all loved it, but Doodles especially enjoyed the fruit leather.

You could certainly play around with this a little bit, maybe add a tiny bit of vanilla to your pulp or a tiny bit of honey…but I like keeping it really simple.  the kids like it without anything added, and that works well for me!

I’ll be sharing more about what I used the strawberry juice for in tomorrow’s post!

Love~Danielle