Dehydrated watermelon
Dehydrating watermelon turned out to be a perfect idea for us, and a much better use of watermelon, this is probably the best way I ever had a watermelon. Now that the weather is not so hot anymore, we stopped eating watermelon from the fridge. Dehydrated watermelon is sweet and feels more like a winter snack than the cold fruit.
What do you need?
To make any dehydrated fruit, you ideally need a dehydrator although some people manage to dehydrate using very low oven heat. When it comes to dehydrators, Excalibur will not disappoint, and this is what I have invested in. I have a four tray dehydrator which yields me a good amount of produce, however, if you plan to dehydrate large quantities, I would buy a nine tray dehydrator, since the machine will be on for quite many hours, it is worth making one batch rather than two. However, I find the four tray to be just enough. Making dehydrated cranberries last me for the year as I do not use them in every meal, so it depends on how much produce you want to prepare.
By the way, since a dehydrator works with a small fan, and food does not get hot, it does not use a lot of electricity.
What else can you make with a dehydrator?
A dehydrator is not an essential kitchen tool but I have made so many cool snacks with it, and it becomes convenient when you have a surplus of food that you want to store. Aside from drying out all fruits; imagine cranberries, strawberries, apple, banana, pineapple, kiwi, you can make crackers, beef jerky and sun-dried tomatoes. Fruit roll-ups are also fun to make, it is pureed fruit and then rolled up. Some people also dehydrate soup ingredients, but I have not yet experimented with this.
Watermelon thickness
Other websites suggest half inch tick watermelon, and we probably made it half that size as we did not want the watermelon to take ages to dry. Ours became paper thin once dry, and the ticker ones turned out more chewy and enjoyable to have.
- 1 small watermelon
- Slice the watermelon into 1/2 inch thick pieces. Ours were 1/4 inch thick and became paper thin.
- Place on the dehydrator tray and dehydrate for 18 hours. We leave the dehydrator running unattended so fruit can be ready earlier or later, but the amount of time will depend on the water content of the fruit.
