My kids love a fruit roll up and we buy a lot of them. The supermarket ones don’t have any nasties in them as far as I can tell except for preservatives, but they are rather expensive and there is quite a lot of packaging involved. The main thing I can’t stand are the collectible cards that are found in a leading brand. These are just constantly littered all over the house. They say they need to keep them as they are collecting them. It is just something else for me to deal with. The kids, given half a chance would eat several of these per day and that is just a silly cost along with the unnecessary bits of card around the place. Since it is my week of after school snack ideas I thought I would try making homemade fruit roll ups.
I wanted to try and achieve a few things:
No packaging and no collectible cards
Use up some ‘on the turn’ fruit
Save a few pennies
I did a lot of searching around and looking at different recipe ideas for these fruit roll ups and then, as usual, decided to ignore what I found and make it up myself. I am definitely a ‘what can I do with what I have in the fridge’ kind of cook! What I didn’t like about the recipes I found was that there was stewing of fruit prior to dehydrating and this seemed a) too labour intensive for me and b) to reduce the benefits of eating the fruit as the process of stewing is likely to affect heat sensitive nutrients and so diminish their positive effects. I decided to skip that step and start with my trusty blender and some fresh fruit.
What you need:
- 1/2 punnet of strawberries (at least you may want more depending on how sweet and juicy they are)
- A large handful of blueberries
- 1/2 punnet of raspberries
- 2 overripe bananas
- 2 small pots of no added sugar strawberry yogurt (if you don’t like sweeteners, as I don’t, check the ingredients as sugar is often replaced by aspartame)
The How:
- Preheat your oven to 50 degrees C or the lowest it can go. The lower the oven is the longer the dehydration process is, but the less heat sensitive nutrients will be damaged
- Put all the ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth
- Line a baking sheet with non stick baking paper or a silicone baking sheet. The quantities given will fill two trays and will then give you around 16-20 rolls depending on how narrow you cut them.
- Pour the fruit mixture into the baking tray and try to get it to an even thickness
- Put tray into the oven and leave for approx 6 – 8hrs. I would suggest checking it after 6hrs the first time you do this and then checking again each 1/2hr as each oven is different
- It is ready when the centre stops being tacky and you should be able to easily peel it off the baking parchment
- Cut into strips using scissors and roll. I take them off the baking parchment once cut and lay onto wax paper before rolling. They are then easy to unpeel and eat.
- I keep them refrigerated in an airtight Tupperware. If they weren’t consumed so quickly by the littles I would keep them until the use by date of the yoghurt
Homemade Fruit Roll Ups do take a long time to dehydrate so you can’t really decide on the day to give them a go, but they are not at all labour intensive. I don’t like to leave the oven on and go out, but don’t worry you won’t be captive in the house whilst making these. I just turn off the oven when I need to go out and leave the door closed. The residual heat will keep drying them out and then I pop the oven back on once I get home until they are ready.
Check on our after school snack page to see all my other ideas for great and healthy after school snacks
Awesome Idea! My kids love fruit roll ups but i agree they’re really expensive. I’ll definitely be giving these a go, thanks for sharing.
If you come up with any other good flavour combos let me know x