Hello friends! Today I bring to you the perfect hiking snack! I know it’s the new year and at lot of us are trying to form better exercising habits. Don’t forget whether you are out in nature or at the gym, fueling yourself is just as important as staying active. This snack has no added sugar and no junk. Just fruit and a smidgen of spicy fun! They are my little friends dried fruit rings and guys, they are so hands off and easy. All you need is a mandoline slicer or a sharp knife and an apple corer. But honestly the apple corer is optional, so all you really need is a knife and some fruit! The dried fruit rings go great on an appetizer platter with a triple creme cheese, such as brie, and a little jam of choice. They also make ideal hiking or camping fuel or a packed lunch snack for your children. They are perfect on their own or mixed into trail mix. I’ve also used a variety of other fruits for the dried fruit rings in the past. Apples and persimmons are just in season now so they are what I used.

As I’ve mentioned a million times, I love persimmons! If you didn’t know I have two other recipes using persimmons: easy vegan persimmon sorbet and roasted root vegetables with persimmons. By buying them in bulk and dehydrating huge batches of them I can have persimmons all year long! Or better yet if you have fruit trees this is a great way to preserve your harvest. No more rotting fruit on the ground as you scramble to figure what you are going to do with your abundant harvest. Or, if you find a neighbor with an overflowing tree ask if you can preserve some of their fruit and offer to give them some. You can do this with vegetables too, to eat on their own or to rehydrate into soups and sauces later. Or to give a Superfoods smoothie that extra nutritional zing. They are such a useful thing to have on hand. And don’t worry, I know that a lot of you probably don’t own a dehydrator so I gave oven and microwave dehydrating instructions as well. You can even dry fruits and vegetables in the sun. No one is excluded from this!

So I did this with both persimmons and apples and they had about the same drying time. As I said, you can do this with all kinds of fruits and vegetables, just make sure they are not too watery or mushy. The hachiya persimmon, my favorite variety, would not be a good choice for this. They are about the consistency of pudding and their drying time would be ridiculously long. If you are going to dehydrate persimmons opt for fuyu, which are the ones shaped like tomatoes and are firmer and easy to find.

My dehydrator is pretty large, it has five trays so I am able to dehydrate a lot of fruit at once. Food really shrinks down when you dehydrate it, so make sure you are dehydrating as much as possible! You want to get as many dried fruit rings as you can from the time and electrical energy it takes to dehydrate. So if you are dehydrating in the oven try to fit as many large baking sheets in your oven as you can! To prep the fruit all you have to do is core it (if necessary) and slice it as thin as possible. 1/4 inch slices are ideal and easy with a mandoline slicer. I free styled mine though and they came out just fine. Some of them had longer dehydrating times, but I just pulled out the ones that were ready when they were ready and let the rest continue to “cook”. Honestly, it is really hard to mess this up; I have faith in you all! If you are an overachiever you can dunk them in a solution of a 1/4 cup lemon juice and a quart of water to try and stave off oxidation to preserve the color, but it’s really not necessary. They will be tasty either way!

Dehydrator: In my dehydrator they dried at 135 for about 10 hours because my slices were thicker, but if you can get them to a 1/4 inch it shouldn’t take more than 6-8 hours. In my dehydrator I can fit about 8 apples sliced, but in the oven you can probably do about three medium large ones.

Microwave (I haven’t personally tried this): Lay the 1/4 inch slices in a single layer on top of a piece of parchment paper on a plate. Microwave on power 5 for about 2 minutes. Check and turn over, cooking at 30 second intervals after that. Keep an eye on them though, because I’ve read that people with stronger microwaves have had issues doing this. Don’t leave them unattended! When the edges of the fruit curl up a little take them out of the microwave and let them sit for 10 minutes. You can’t stack the fruit on top of each other so you’ll have to do this in batches. If you try this for yourself let me know how it goes or if I need to tweak the instructions! Trial and error my friends.

Oven: Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Slice up about 3 apples as thinly as you can. Line a couple baking sheets with parchment paper or a silpat if you have one! (Can I just throw in real quick that I think the word silpat is really fun to say?) Bake for one hour, flip and bake for another hour or until crispy!

Dried fruit rings are delicious plain, but I dressed mine up with some various spice combos. I don’t have specific measurements for this. I just dumped some spice in my palms and then sprinkled the chips with the spice. Remember that the spice and sweetness of the fruit will intensify while the fruit is dehydrating so don’t go to heavy! Plus you don’t want to disguise the flavor of the fruit, you want to enhance it. I’m really hammering this one home, because I think I personally over did it with the spice. You can see in the pictures which ones look a little heavy. You can always give your fruit slices a little pat to get the spices off if you put too much, but that’s just a waste! So don’t go hog wild in a jazz hand, spice flinging frenzy like me and lay off a little! I mean, lay off a little please. 😉

Here are a couple of seasoning ideas, but feel free to add your own flare. There are no rules! (Besides not going heavy on the spices. Hehe )

Spice Combos:

• Cinnamon and nutmeg
• Salt and cayenne
• Chinese 5 spice and cinnamon
• Clove and ginger
• Chili powder and cinnamon
• Chili powder and salt
• Onion and garlic powder (for vegetables)
• Garlic and oregano/sage and thyme (for vegetables)
• Paprika and chili powder (for vegetables or fruits)

Do you have any spice ideas? Share them in the comments below so we can all try them out!