FUN! Making "Free" Fruit Rollups

Excited to see how this turns out! An acquaintance on an eGroup mentioned you could make fruit "leather" in a dehydrator. Wow. I haven't made those homemade, well, since my mother made them in an oven. I wasn't overly impressed back then.

I have a Silpat mat which is too large for my dehydrator, but since I have an Excalibur, I can bend the front of the Silpat and close the lid/door and it works. So I tried turning some commercial applesauce (Motts) into fruit leather.

It worked! But since I only have one Silpat, spending 6 hours for 1 or 2 applesauce roll ups is not really time or energy efficient. 

I debated about buying some flexible sheets made for the Excalibur. Depending on whether you get brand name Excalibur sheets or generic flexible sheets, they can run anywhere from $6.95 to $14.98 and I would still have to cut them to fit my 11"x11" trays (evidently the newer trays are 14" long.)

Someone mentioned I should try the flexible cutting boards at Dollar Tree. Hmmm. I stopped by the Dollar Tree near me, and they had them!!

They come two mats to a pack. The blurry center is the actual cutting mat. They are very thin: honestly? for cutting I'm not so sure I'd use them, however they look perfect for my purposes. They cut easily: I just lined up the actual tray insert and cut slightly less than that. They are 11" wide, so no adjustment was needed at the width; 3 inches was trimmed from the length.

Video will be coming later. I made three trays worth, using individual serving sizes of applesauce (the kind you would put in a lunch bag.) I wanted to have uniform amounts on the trays. The top tray (this one) was intentionally a bit thick. I dumped out the sauce in the center, spread it out by shaking the tray around. 

The second tray I used an offset spatula to spread it thin. I did this before when I used Silpat. It tasted great, but it had the consistency of apple "paper" rather than a roll up. The third tray is not as thick or thin as the other two trays. Time will tell which one works best.

I'm really looking forward to posting the video and finding out if these trays work well. If they do, I just saved myself a ton of money (all four trays lined for $2.00!) At that rate, I could buy more than a year's worth (10 sets) for $20.