Do you eat enough fruit? I don’t. One of my favorite snack foods are those dehydrated granny smith apple chips. You can find them in the grocery store in bags like potato chips, but more healthy.

I decided it would be fun to make some myself. To do that, I learned that you need the following items:

- a Dehydrator (affiliate)

Nesco offers several different dehydrator wattages. The higher the wattage, the shorter the drying time. Wal-mart sells them too if you don’t want to go through somebody online like Amazon. Wal-mart is where we bought the one pictured in this post.

- knife
- some granny smith apples
- some oranges
- a can of pineapple juice (for pre-treating apples)
- zip lock bags or saran wrap
- (optional) sugar

The Nesco dehydrator we bought didn’t require any assembly. Simply open the box and remove the instruction manual and jerky spice bags. I’m not going to cover making jerky in this post, but that’s another common use for a dehydrator.

There are four trays that stack upon each other with the blower inserted at the top and down through a hole in the middle. Whatever you’re dehydrating — fruits, vegetables, flowers — is placed on these trays.

How to pre-treat apples
According to the instructions that came with the dehydrator, most fruits do not require pre-treatment, but ones that oxidize more should be pre-treated. Oxidation is what happens when sliced fruit turns brown.

Apples, pears, peaches and apricots have a longer shelf-life, are more appetizing and higher nutritional value when pre-treated. To pre-treat apples, once sliced immediately put in a holding solution of pineapple juice. Do not keep the apples in the solution longer than an hour. Slice the apples in half and then into 1/4″ or less slices, place them in the solution, wait a few minutes, and then lay out on the trays.

You can also squeeze a few orange or apples and use that juice for a pre-treatment solution. Tip: drink the juice when done pre-treating, it’s good for you.

Oranges
You can optionally peel the orange. Cut the ends off the orange to where there is a small amount of peel and mostly orange on the inside. Then cut the orange in half down the center and cut into 1/4″ or less thick slices and place them in a circular pattern around they trays.

If they are touching they will stick together when dried, so try to leave a tiny bit of space between them. You can mix the orange and apples on the trays.

Notice how the apples appear a bit brownish in the picture below? These were not pre-treated. I wanted to run a test batch that wasn’t pre-treated to see the difference in taste. There is a loss of flavor and vitamins A and C if not pre-treated.

As mentioned above, the dehydration process varies based on the wattage of the dehydrator as well as how full the load is on the trays. The instruction manual provides a range of 6-12 hours for apples and oranges to dehydrate. The first batch I tried took about 8 hours to fully dehydrate three of the four trays.

Optional: you can shake sugar over the fruit before drying. This will make them a bit sweeter. You can also add sugar afterwards. If you’ve ever had the apple chips in a bag, you’ll notice they are sugary. The oranges have enough flavor as is. I prefer the granny smith apples dehydrated to the oranges.

Once done remove the trays and either put on a plate and wrap with saran wrap to keep the air out or put in ziplock bags to store. You can also use tupperware. If any condensation appears on the lid then you didn’t dehydrate the fruit long enough.

Beyond dehydrated snack chips
You can do a lot more with a dehydrator besides fruit snacks like make your own leathery fruit roll-ups, beef jerky and vegetables. If you’re like me and don’t eat enough fruit and enjoy snack foods like potato chips, pretzels, consider dehydrating your own fruit and vegetable chips instead. A healthy alternative.

Got any other dehydrated foods you enjoy that we should try out?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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