Banana Chips ~ A Healthy Snack
Weekends are big around here. On our days off together, Matt and I try to pack in as many projects as we can. In fact, we’ve even cancelled our satellite programming for the next few months to give us no excuses. So far, so good (and, for those of you who know me that is saying a lot because I’m a TV junkie).
Saturday and part of Sunday morning was spent boiling sap and making our second batch of delicious Canadian Gold ~ Maple Syrup. Our second batch was as light as the first and would probably be classified as a Grade A Light to Medium. It looks great, nice and clear with very little sap sand. And, the taste is what gets me doing this year after year. Mmmm, it is so good! One spoonful is never enough and once you get a taste of that sweet maple flavour on your lips it’s hard to put the bottle away. Okay, I’ve got to stop writing about this because I’m beginning to need another sugar fix.
Put Up Total:
- 13 x 500mL
- 1 x 350mL
Once the maple syrup was all safely sealed in bottles and out of temptations reach, we could try our attention to the 12lbs of bananas we bought to dehydrate into chips. Dehydrating is a relatively easy project and makes great sense when you have a glut of fruits and/or veggies or can get something tasty for a great price. On Wednesday, we purchased our 12lbs of bananas for 39cents/lb. Yeah, that’s right 39cents! It’s a great deal and we have our local fruit and veggie store, Muskoka Vegeez to thank.
RECIPE FOR DEHYDRATING BANANA CHIPS:
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bananas
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Select ripe bananas and as many as you can dehydrate at one time. Our machine, the Excalibur 3900, has 9 large trays and holds approximately 12lbs of fruit or in this case 28 bananas.
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Slice the bananas in equal 1/8 inch pieces. The more evenly your fruit is sliced the better because it will dry evenly. One of our readers kindly mentioned that an egg slicer works well for a lot of these projects and she wasn’t kinding. The egg slicer works wonderfully! Thank-you Shenna for the suggestion.
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Spread the pieces onto the trays and place into the dehydrator for 6-10 hours. We’ve set our timer for 6 hours and will check them for doneness at that time. If they are finished then we will remove them and store in air tight mason jars. If not, we will add more time and continue to check for doneness. Update ~ it took us 11 hours to dehydrate the banana chips. They are still chewy but safe for storage.
Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it!? It takes about 1 hour to slice and place all of the bananas onto the trays and that’s with one extra pair of hands.
Put up Total:
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4 x 500mL regular mouth mason jars
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1 x 1L regular mouth mason jar
Putting Up With The Turnbulls 
glad the suggestion to use the egg slicer worked! I’ve used it for strawberries, mushrooms and eggs….never thought of bananas though!
It worked great. All the pieces were evenly sliced and it made the job really quick. Thanks again for the great tip!
I don’t own a dehydrator (yet). Is there any way I can use my oven, or is it just too hot?
The recommended temperature for drying sliced fruit is 135degrees F. Our ovens lowest temperature is 170degrees F and although we could probably do it in our oven, this job would have to be carefully monitored and the door opened from time to time to lower the temp. Maybe your oven has a lower setting?
We are really happy with the dehydrator. It has a timer that you can set so that you are basically able to walk away until the project is complete making it super convenient. And, the quality/taste of the fruit is so much better than any we’ve purchased already dry.
I love my Excalibur! What a workhorse! I recently convinced our local food charity to invest in one since they occasionally get too much of some produce to be able to distribute it all. Currently it’s heads of garlic about at the end of it’s storage period. We’re slicing it and dehydrating into chips, some of which will be ground into powder.
I haven’t done bananas. Did you dip them in lemon to prevent browning? I usually forgo that step. Haven’t found it necessary yet.
Agreed, the Excalibur is a workhorse!
No, we didn’t dip them in lemon and they didn’t brown. Working together we were able to muscle through it pretty quickly and had them in the machine before they started to turn. I did wonder if it’d be necessary but am glad we were able to skip that step.
I love banana chips…but hate bananas! I never have understood this about myself…lol!
Nice work over the weekend…I’m so envious of your maple syrup…it looks delicious!
Thanks for the tip about using the egg slicer to get nice even banana slices. We also spray out banana slices with lemon juice to prevent the chips from getting dark in the dehydrator.
And I’m definitely going to try the egg slicer for mushrooms too.
what a great snack. The egg slicer looks perfect. Your syrup is so gorgeous!
Hello .. I’m new in the dehydration world .. and I’ve tried bananas twice .. they taste great .. but they look bad although I’ve treated them with lemon juice before dehydrating them.. do you have any suggestions? Thanks
We just slice quickly and place them on the tray and start the machine. We have not used the lemon juice on bananas.