Nutrition
| Per 100 g | Per 1 oz (28 g) | |
|---|---|---|
| Energy | 290 kcal | 82 kcal |
| Protein | 3.5 g | 1 g |
| Fat | 1.7 g | 0.5 g |
| saturated | 0.1 g | 0 g |
| Carbohydrate | 52.8 g | 15 g |
| sugars | 45.2 g | 12.8 g |
| Fibre | 20.3 g | 5.8 g |
| Sodium | 6 mg | 2 mg |
Estimated from the ingredients, for the finished dried product. Actual values vary with the produce you use and how far you dry it.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg pears (about 8 medium)
- 12 cups raspberries
- 3/8 cup honey
- 6 vanilla beans
- 265 millilitres lemon juice
Instructions
- Use pears that give under your thumb at the neck. A hard pear is mostly starch and grit, and neither of those turns into anything worth eating on a sheet.
- Blend the pears, raspberries, honey, lemon juice and the scraped vanilla seeds to a thick puree with no lumps left. A lump of pear inside the sheet is a wet spot that stays wet.
- Push the puree through a sieve if seeds bother you, but you will lose some body doing it. Raspberry seeds are what give this leather its slight grit, and most people would rather keep them.
- Spread the puree on a lined tray to about the thickness of a coin, thinner in the middle than around the rim. The outer edge sits in the fastest-moving air and will be done first, so give it less to lose.
- Dry at 40 °C for 7 hours. This is a low, slow setting, so do not be alarmed that the sheet still looks wet halfway through — the colour going from bright pink to a deeper rose is the better sign of progress.
- The sheet is ready when a fingertip pressed into the centre lifts away clean and the surface has stopped looking glossy. If the middle still prints, leave it and look again in an hour.
- Peel it off the mat while it is warm and lay it straight onto baking paper. A pear leather cools sticky and will weld itself to the mat if you let it go cold there.
- Cut it through the paper, roll it up, and keep the rolls in a sealed jar with a desiccant sachet. Honey draws moisture back out of the air, which is why these need the sachet where a plain fruit leather does not, and they will keep about a month.
