Going Bananas!

Good evening, all! 

So, during the Christmas holiday, we were gifted a Nesco American Harvest dehydrator.  We had already done some jerky using round steak.  Next, came banana chips (one of Mr. B's faves).  It was an interesting lesson, but overall the results were decent.  Below, you will find a full account of our experience and the methods with which we accomplished some yummy, albeit chewy, banana chips.

First of all, we cut out bananas into 1/4" (or thereabouts) pieces per typical directions for banana chips.  This helps to ensure that your banana pieces will turn out nice and crisp via the dehydrating process.

We then dipped our banana slices in a mixture of 1/2 cup honey and and 1/4 water.

After stirring around the banana pieces in the water/honey mixture, we used a small opening wire strainer to run off the excess mix.  The directions state that you should drain them, but we assumed that recycling the mix was the best method as to not use too much honey.  Side note:  The honey that was used was from a local establishment only minutes away.  Always go local when you can.  This helps the local economy while allowing you to better control what is going on with your food ingredients.

After your banana pieces have been properly strained, you lay them out on your dehydrator trays.  Be sure to keep a good distance between them so as not to elongate the drying process.

Once the drying process is complete (this will vary based on the thickness of your banana pieces), you then are free to package them as you please.  We simply put them into an airtight sandwich bag since the six bananas we dehydrated yielded only that much necessary capacity.

We do apologize for the lack of pictures of the finished products, but it totally slipped our minds.  The chips came out with a deeper brown color than we had anticipated.  We suspect this is due to not treating them with a lemon/water solution, as we have seen elsewhere.  The reason for not treating them with said solution was that we thought the honey/water coating might alleviate the chances of oxidation.  We believe that hypothesis might be false.

Verdict:

The banana chips, while full of flavor, came out rather chewy.  We attribute this to the honey/water mixture that probably hindered the dehydration process.  The chips had an estimated 6 - 12 hour processing time, according to the Nesco Dehydrator guide, yet we left them in for an additional 6 hours.  Next time, we will probably use the method of treating them in the lemon / water blend and dehydrating them untreated.  Nevertheless, our little guy loves them and the flavor is great.  So, not all is lost.

Do you have a preferred method of banana chip making?  If so, let us know in the comment...

Until then...

Keep Calm

and

Can On