I just love apple season
This is how I dehydrate apples
I wash the apples
I dry them and polish them up a bit
I set up the peeling area and put lemon juice in a spray bottle
They still make apple peelers like this one. This will peel, core and slice the apple.
If you don't have a apple peeler like this one you can use a knife and still do the job, it will take longer.
The apple will slide right off the core
Slice the apple one time for half rings
This is how the slices look
After dipping the slices in lemon juice or spraying the slices in a plate with lemon juice I then placed them on one of the dehydrator trays. My trays hold about three to three and a half apples and I have eight trays for my dehydrator.
I kept going until all the apples were peeled, cored, sliced and sprayed with lemon juice.
This is my dehydrator I bought several years ago. It is a Gardenmaster My first dehydrator was a small cheeper one and it would dry some things but you could not dry much at a time. I like the way the air flows around the trays in this one and that it holds so much more.
I am dehydrating 26 apples in this batch.
My dehydrating book says that it will take about 4 to 10 hours to dehydrate apples at 135 degrees. However, we live in an area that has high humidity much of the time. They must be dry to a snap or click sound when dropped my goal is crunchy dry like chips for storage. I must go by crispy and to get the apples to the apple chip point it could take 12 to 24 hours.
So how long did these apples take? 18 hours at a constant 135 degrees, they snap and are not leathery. They went through a leathery stage at about 12 hours but then 6 more hours and they went to crispy and melt in your mouth. You have to judge your time, you need to keep them going until they are 95 percent dry.
I put 50 half rings in each pint jar
Then I air sealed them with my food saver attachment. If I wanted to lenghten the shelf life even more I would put oxygen absorbers but I don't have any right now. You can also simply put them in ziplock bags for shorter storage time.
This is about three apples. We can eat them as a snack or rehydrate them to use in cooking.
To rehydrate the apple for cooking to go over our oatmeal I pour boiling water over them and let them sit until they are back to plump. I just dropped this piece of dehydrated apple in the water just to show you that you will need hot water to rehydrate for cooking. It may take 30 minutes or so to plump back up. Some things take longer such as vegetables to make a stew.
These are ready to go into the pantry
