How to Make Homemade Dried Fruit Snacks in Your Oven

If you're looking for healthy, fun-to-eat snacks for your family, dried fruit can often fit the bill. For some reason, kids who won't sit down and peel and eat a banana, will happily munch on a bag of crunchy banana chips. Maybe it's the convenience, or the taste, or even the crunch that make dried fruits so appealing. Whatever the reason, read this instructive article and learn how to make homemade dried fruit snacks in your oven today!

Choose the Fruit You Want to Use
The first step is to choose the type of fruit you want to dry. Some good choices are bananas, apples, apricots, peaches, cherries, grapes, plums and pears. No matter what type of fruit you choose, you'll want to use only fully ripened, unblemished produce. If you don't use flavorful fruit to begin with, your finished product isn't going to taste good.

How much fruit do you need? That depends on the type. As a general rule of thumb, you should plan on getting approximately five pounds of fruit out of every twenty-five pounds of fresh fruit you use. Now you know why buying dried fruit is so expensive, eh?

Prepare the Fruit for Oven Drying
The second step is to wash the fruit well. Then, to make homemade dried fruit snacks in your oven, you can peel apples, or not. It's your choice. All the other fruits I mentioned need not be peeled, except the bananas, peaches and pears.

Now, you'll need to prepare the fruit according to its type. Here are a few helpful tips you should use as you prepare them:

1. Light-colored fruits such as apples, apricots, bananas and peaches need to be dipped in lemon juice before they are dried in your oven. The acidic juice helps these fruits from turning dark brown.

2. No matter how you cut the larger fruit up- into quarter-inch slices or rings- or if you cut the smaller fruit in half- make sure the pieces are uniform in size. This way, they'll all dry in the same amount of time.

3. If you prefer to dry small fruits like cherries or grapes whole, you'll need to vent the skins. To do this, you'll need to make a small slice in the ends with a sharp paring knife to allow the steam to escape.