Dehydrating Bananas

Bananas are a delicious and healthy snack. Dehydrating bananas is a great way to preserve them. And it's super easy to do! All you need is a dehydrator and some bananas. Here's how to dehydrate bananas.

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Dehydrating Bananas

Dehydrating bananas can be a tricky bit of business. Have you tried it and just didn't want to eat them?

The typical instructioins you find online are to dehydrate for 15 hours at a 135°F. And it dries them just fine. The only problem is, they don't taste very good.

Dehydrating bananas takes away a lot of the flavor, leaving you with what becomes basically a faintly sweet, semi-spongy disk of carbon matter. Who wants to eat that? Not me, not my kids.

But when you buy commercially dehydrated bananas they taste just fine! They're crunchy. How do they achieve this effect with dehydrated bananas? You won't like the answer, I promise.

Ready? Okay, here it is.

They deep fry commercial dehydrated bananas. They deep fry them in coconut oil and then dip them in sugar water or honey. Sometimes they will add banana flavoring. I'll let you think about that one for a minute.

Okay, so obviously making dehydrated bananas takes something more than a high temperature and patience. But surely there's a healthier way to cook them, that doesn't involve deep-fat frying.

How to Make Dehydrated Bananas at Home:

Cut the bananas into equal-sized slices and place them over your dehydrator trays, after soaking them in some lemon juice for about five minutes.

Any citrus will work, so if you prefer, use any sort of unsweetened juice.

Dehydrate them a bit slower, at about 125°F, for about 18 hours. Stop when they're pliable, not crunchy.

Also, for a tasty treat, try treating the raw banana with coconut or cinnamon before you then dehydrate bananas.

The results make me a happy monkey, and I do not say this lightly. An added benefit of treating your bananas in this fashion is that they'll add a pleasant zing if you use them in banana bread–or even if you just throw them into your next bowl of oatmeal or cold cereal.

Make sure to store them in an air-tight container like mason jars.