A few weeks ago I bought 90lbs of apples. Click here to see what I did with the first half. The second half I saved for the dehydrator. When you dehydrate apples yourself, you get a snack that is ten times better than the gummy chewy stuff you get in the store. With the right equipment, they are super easy to slice and dehydrate. It’s not really that hard even if you don’t have the right equipment. I filled my dehydrator twice. The first time I made plain dehydrated apples and the second time I made cinnamon dehydrated apples.
How To Dehydrate Apples Step by Step:
Wash your apples.
This is an apple and potato peeler. It’s not the greatest work of engineering (it has its problems) but it’s a lot better than peeling apples by hand, even if it does give you a little trouble once in a while. You don’t have to peel your apples to dehydrate them so if you don’t have one don’t think you have to peel all the apples by hand.
The apple fits on like this.
Here you can see the blade peeling the apple.
Here you can see the apple from a different angle.
This gadget also slices apples. That’s really why I use it to dehydrate apples. The slices are all uniform and allow the fruit to be done at the same time. You can find the apple peeler on Amazon here. (see below for update)
Chop the slices in half.
Load up your trays.
Apples will oxidize (turn brown) in the dehydrator if you don’t use an anti-oxidizer like lemon juice or citric acid. Although there is nothing wrong with oxidized dehydrated apples my boys would prefer non-brown apples. Since I had a lot of apples to slice I went with lemon juice in a spray bottle. It worked really well and did not turn the apples sour. In the past, I have just soaked the apples in a bowl full of water with added lemon juice and honey. The spray bottle is much faster and easier!
Load your dehydrator trays in your dehydrator. I have a 9 tray Excalibur Dehydrator. My apples took about 8 hours.
This is what they look like when they are done.
How To Make Dehydrated Cinnamon Apples:
Fill a plastic bag with apples and add enough cinnamon to coat, about 2T
Shake the bag until all apples are well coated.
Place the apples on dehydrator trays. I did not add any anti-oxidizer. Since the apples were already brown from the cinnamon I didn’t see any reason to.
This is what the cinnamon apples look like when they are done.
I put the apples in the freezer for two weeks to “pasteurize” them, then I store them in half gallon canning jars. I use a FoodSaver to vacuum pack them.
Here is the attachment I use for the vacuum packing. You can find it on Amazon here. For the half gallon canning jars, you need to use the wide mouth jar sealer.
Yum!
Update:
As you might have noticed the link above goes to this apple peeler, not the green one I used in the post. While peeling and coring the apples my old apple peeler would act up. It would peel only half of the apple or it would only core the apple half way. After doing some research I decided to purchase the one you see above. It’s more heavy duty than my old one and it had great reviews on Amazon.
We peeled 10 apples without a problem so I’m confident that we will have an easier time next time we dehydrate apples.
