Favorite Fruit Roll Up Flavors

I am getting ready to cook up the apples that are in storage. I will be making fruit roll ups for the kids. It is very economical and my kids absolutely love them. Here are some our our favorite fruit roll up flavors...

* applesauce
* applesauce / cranberry / cinnamon / pinch of brown sugar
* peach
* grape (=dirty fingers)
* blueberry (=dirty fingers)
* strawberry
* strawberry / rhubarb

Here is my process:
1) cook fruit medium heat until softened
2) process fruit in food strainer to remove skins/seeds
3) while still warm, spread on dehydrator trays
4) fruit dries overnight in electric dehydrator
5) peel, cut with kitchen scissors, and wrap for storage using unbleached wax paper and quart mason canning jars/lids
6) Store away from light and heat (=basement)

Improvements made:
* Do not waste time peeling fruit, cut in large chunks and pit the peaches prior to cooking
* Do not wrap final pieces individually. Instead think of a continuous roll of wax paper cut to the width that will fit in the mason jar with the cut fruit roll up pieces on it like a mosaic. This uses less wax paper and more final product fits in the jar. To retrieve fruit, peel it off the long rolled up waxed paper.
* Cook as much fruit as will fit in the dehydrator at one time. You get a feel for this over time.

Future goals:
* Cooked winter squash on it's own did dehydrate, but in chunks and not as a roll up. I would like to try some combination with applesauce / maple syrup / cooked butternut squash to get the correct pliability.
* The grape and blueberry were very very concentrated. I would like to thin this out with the addition of applesauce so as to maintain the grapey flavor, but stretch the grapes and blueberry raw material.
* I would like to try a berry forest pie type combination (strawberry, raspberry (Red+ Black), and blueberries)

I would love to hear your favorite flavors for fruit and / or vegetable roll ups.

Hi, Ginger and welcome to permies!

I got hungry just reading your thread. I haven't made any fruit roll ups for a long time and never the variety of yours! They all sound wonderful. This winter I have been drying pumpkin pulp...our pumpkins are so huge that when cook one we only eat a small portion of it so I am pulping and dehydrating the rest. I like your idea for mixing squash with applesauce and a sweetener...and might try that on the next batch.

Apricots are the only fruit that grows in excess around here. We make lotsa jam, but when we run out of jars, we spread the rest of the jam out on plastic sheets in a sunny well ventilated room to dry. In this desert climate that's all it takes to dry. So it consists of chopped up apricots, cooked with enough sugar to take the edge off, but not enough to make traditional sticky jam. We don't run it through a food mill so it has the chunks of fruit and is bumpy; I guess if I wanted to develop an attractive product for sale it would be good to run it through the food mill, but we don't mind it bumpy for ourselves.

But our apricot leather is so tough we can't cut it with scissors, and actually cutting it into pieces to eat is a problem. Also we don't have waxed paper here so we peel it off the plastic.

I dehydrate on unbleached parchment paper instead of the non stick sheets that came with the dehydrator. This way I can just cut the fruit leather into the shape I want with its backing already attached.

I haven't experimented with nearly as many flavors. We are only just getting started with fruits on the property so it's mostly just been the applesauce my daughter's helped my in-laws make from their apple trees.