dried strawberry
Describing the simple step-by-step process of drying strawberry at home with a food dehydrator.
Food: Strawberry
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Dehydrate Time: 20 hours
Total Time: 20 hours 10 minutes
It’s almost the end of strawberry season. So, why not dry some strawberries?
drying strawberry
strawberry
It is always best to eat the foods that are in season. Not only are they more natural and taste better, they tend to be cheaper as well. That’s why I went and bought a whole basket of strawberries. I picked out the ones that are lumpy or a bit bruised to make into dried fruits and kept the others for eating fresh.
These strawberries are smaller in size, and I also didn’t weigh them before drying. So…let’s just say…I used one big bowl of strawberries for dehydration.
preparing strawberry
To prepare the strawberries for dehydration, I pulled the leafy top off and washed them. I’ve seen online where some people cut the strawberries into slices, but mines are smaller, so I halved my strawberries.
Again, I didn’t bother with preventing the oxidation, so the strawberry halves went straight on the dehydrator.
The preparation is simple, but because there are many strawberries, the prepping took about 10 minutes.
drying strawberry
According to the manual, fruits should be dried at 55-60°C. There weren’t detailed instructions on this particular fruit on the manual, so I thought I would just turn off the machine when they looked dry enough.
I left the machine on overnight and swapped the trays for even drying. Unfortunately, I had to leave the house in the morning, so these strawberries were dried longer than expected. The strawberries halves were dried for about 20 hours.
During dehydration, the drying strawberries smells really nice. I image this could be what the colour pink would smell like.
dried strawberry
Due to being dried for too long, the dried strawberries halves are now almost as thin as paper, and they are quite dark in colour.
Even though during dehydration, the strawberries smelled really sweet, the dried products taste more sour than sweet. Actually, dried strawberries have a really faint taste when compared with the other dried fruits I have made. I don’t particularly like the taste of dried strawberries…maybe because I over-dried them? But I do find them quite nice when added into yogurt.
