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Whether you are trying to enrich your diet with more healthy fruit or whether you have children in mind and are thinking of their nutritional requirements, one great way to do so is to make dried fruit. This also ensures you are getting plenty of natural sugars and vitamins in your diet. Dried fruit is very versatile and can be eaten alone as a snack or used to decorate your favorite jello recipe in a unique way. The only problem is that dried fruit can be quite expensive but this is easily overcome when you discover how easy it is to make your own.
If you like to make jello and you are looking for a way to make an easy jello, which is both healthy and tasty, then you can use dried fruit as a topping. This also makes the jello more interesting to look at. Adding some dried fruit pieces to the sides and top of the jello cake recipe is a lot of fun and your kids will love to help you with this. Before you rush out for bananas, pears and apples, keep reading for some fruit drying tips.
The simplest way to dry your fruit is to use a food dehydrator. This allows you to control the drying speed, temperature, and everything else to dry your fruit to perfection. This machine is also able to dry your fruit without occupying valuable stove time, which is a bonus if you are busy with other things. Fruits such as pears and apples will dry at a stable 135F and come out looking and tasting wonderful, making excellent toppings for your favorite jello recipe.
If you want to dry your fruit using the old fashioned method instead, this is equally straightforward. First of all, choose some fruits to dry. Bananas and apples are popular choices and are good if this is the first time you are drying fruit. You need to cut the fruit. If you cut it into thin slices, it can be dried more quickly. In addition, thin slices look beautiful on a jello recipe.
Then, you will want to prepare the fruit. Many fruits will go brown or even blacken when they have been exposed too long to air, and to prevent this, you can briefly soak them in a variety of solutions that will help preserve their color. Fruit juice with a high level of citric acid, ascorbic acid, or even a honey and water can help your fruit looking great. This should also be done to any fruits that you put in a food dehydrator.
There are several ways to dry your fruit after you have prepared it. For instance, you can use a plastic needle to thread your fruit onto clean cotton thread and set up a rack in the sun. This method can take a few days, depending on juicy the fruit is. Remember to put down a cloth to catch any drips. You can also use a conventional oven. To use this method, put down some wax paper over a cookie sheet and lay the fruit slices on it, without letting them touch each other. Set the oven to about 175 degrees and let it simply cook for a while. This will take several hours but do not turn the oven up to speed the process!
Your fruit is done when you decide it is ready, so get experimenting because making dried fruit is a lot of fun and it is gorgeous when added to a jello recipe or other mouthwatering dessert.
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