Banana Chips

I’ve always been infatuated with the idea of a dehydrator. The thought that you could take a fruit, vegetable or piece of meat and put in a new form that allowed it to be stored and enjoyed later. I’ve been canning different fruits and vegetables for a few years but have always been limited on the amount of space it takes to store canning supplies and store canned goods, so a dehydrator made a ton of sense. It could take those same fruits and veggies and reduce their mass which would allow me to store more with far less equipment than if I was to exclusively can.

I researched dehydrators and settled on one that did not have a large footprint but did have temp and time options as well as did not require its contents to be manually rotated.

Today I took it out of the box, eyeballed the very old, gross looking bananas in my wire bins and thought, “we are going to make Banana Chips.”

My children were incredibly excited, banana chips are something they love and they also love working in the kitchen with me.

We carefully mixed our ingredients to prevent the bananas from browning, sliced our bananas (with tons of “Eeewwww!s” because they were extra squishy), brushed them with our lemon water and sprinkled some salt and cinnamon on them. It was Adam’s idea to sprinkle cinnamon on them and they looked delicious.

I set the dehydrator on 95* and kept them the fruit in for 3 hours. After the kids’ nap we took them out and the house smelled amazing! The kids devoured them, though they were still mushy, and they liked the apple slices too (there was still room left on one tray so I threw in sliced green apple to see what would happen).

The apple did a lot better and was much drier than the banana slices, which were probably about half dry. Next time I think I will increase the temperature a little bit and leave them in a little longer and hopefully they will be more like a chip!

Here is the recipe: Banana Chips