Autumn Olive.. trying fruit leather

I'm rushing to finish my solar dehydrator in time to test it out with my autumn olive foraging harvest.  

Found a thicket of them in a small clearing at the end of a dirt road area and yesterday they were ripe enough to harvest about 7lbs!

I love them frozen, dried, fresh,  in baking etc.   But I'd like to try some fruit leather with this abundance (sugar free).

Here's a few recipe links I found:

https://thecookscook.com/recipes/autumn-olive-autumn-berry-fruit-leather/

this one has some "boil or don't boil" discussion:
https://ouroneacrefarm.com/2015/09/18/autumn-olive-fruit-leather/

https://eattheplanet.org/autumn-olive-fruit-leather-recipe/

Those berries are so pretty.

How did the fruit leather turn out?

Just curious what do Autumn Olives taste like?

Anne Miller wrote:

Just curious what do Autumn Olives taste like?

I also wanna know what they taste like as fruit leather. Because the fruits themselves START as tasty for a split second on your tongue before you're left with this weird terrible astringent dryness coating your mouth! Supposedly processing helps gets rid of the astringency.

When they are over-ripe that astringency goes away somewhat and they are very pleasant to scarf by the handful,  especially after the weather turns cold.  IF you like tart fruit.

They taste rather similar to cranberry to me, but sweeter.  

I haven't done the leather YET,   it's gotten very cool and shorter days here seemingly suddenly and not sure my new solar dehydrator would do it.  

I DID can a lot of the berries though and then strain it for JUICE which is really nice (cranberry juice like).      I really love autumn olives;   I've harvested over 15lbs at this point and will go back to the spot again this weekend.  They are plumper and sweeter every week!  

Oh you have got me excited for my bushes to get bigger! I can't wait to get pounds of fruit. We only get cups. The juice would be lovely. Were you planning on straining out the seeds for the fruit leather or leaving them in for texture?

I have a golden berried bush and a ruby berried bush. The yellow berries are much sweeter and less astringent than the red ones. This year is the first year that the children haven't stripped them both bare as soon as the berries were ripe. I ate some overripe ones yesterday that I found hiding among the leaves and they aren't astringent at all!

Matt Todd wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:

Just curious what do Autumn Olives taste like?

I also wanna know what they taste like as fruit leather.

Autumn olive fruit leather is something that never lasts in my home.  Its lovely sweet tart flavor is hard to resist for my family.  You definitely want to wait to harvest them until that astringency ripens away.  I don't know if it would disappear with drying, but I think the flavor of the fruit improves with ripening time so it's worth the wait before putting the work in.  I learned how to make it after attending a foraging session with Russ Cohen, author of "Wild Plants I Have Known...and Eaten".

I love autumn olive.  I have them growing wild all over my property.  They seem to like the company of cedar, which I'm removing, and apples, which is the reason I'm removing the cedar.

As others have said the astringency goes away when they are ripe.  They have a wonderful flavor that is both sweet and tart.  I only wish they were bigger and easier to harvest.

Harvesting..  if you have a heavy branch of them,   I find it easy to strip them into a bucket placed underneath and do the whole long branch at once.   Some are more branched though instead of long thin "wands" and they are harder to get at.   I had one of those type on my farm too.   Yummy but time consuming.

I just started making JUICE with them, and the flavor is somewhere between pomegranate and cranberry to me.  When it cools it's a pretty creamy-pink color and the berries settle to the bottom.   I let them steep for a few weeks after they are processed before opening, and strain them then.    

I made these with mint and stevia, pressure canned:

I have snipped autumn olive fruit leather into small bits and thrown those into muffins, but I just ran into this recipe for autumn olive flour muffins that made me wish I had dried a pile of autumn olives this year.  Something for me to look forward to next year.  Check out the nice color autumn olive flour brings to these.  Might be nice with your juice to wash them down, Heather