Adventures in Dehydrating: Bananas

I made a quick stop at the local grocery store the other day and found that they were selling a cartload full of bags of ripe bananas for 99 cents (each bag had about a dozen bananas in it).  These weren't the make banana bread with me now or I'll go all gushy bananas either, they were the eat me today because I am ripe bananas.  So I bought a big bag of ripe bananas because I knew that we could dry them.

We used a banana slicer to cut our bananas. It is quick and provides a uniform thickness.  We have also used a mandoline to cut bananas, but they are slippery and sticky, the banana slicer is quicker and less of the banana gets smashed to bits in the process.


I laid out the slices in our dehydrator and set it to the fruit and vegetable setting (135 degrees) and let it go.


It's been pretty hot and humid here, so even with the AC running, these took a bit longer than usual to dry. They usually take 12-16 hours, but this time they took 24 hours to dry.  We like our dried fruits to err on the dry side, so these were dry to the touch and crispy along the edges while still being flexible.


It took about 10 medium sized bananas to fill the 5 trays of our dehydrator.  For $1 and a little effort, we ended up with one quart sized bag full of dried banana chips.  I'll be keeping an eye out for the ripe banana bags in the future!


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