Here’s just another one of those kind-of-random, but potentially-flavor-changing build block sort of posts. Let’s go over the simplest way to dehydrate strawberries and why you’d ever want to do such a thing.
Just some context before we just into this super easy process: I make strawberry cheesecake cookies that everyone seems to love, but I’d been using the dehydrated strawberries from Lidl in the cookie dough.
There’s just something about making everything that I possibly can from scratch when I’m baking or cooking… if there’s an element of a dish that I can make myself, there’s a good chance I’m going to do that. So these cookies call for lots of strawberry flavor (obviously), but fresh strawberries are a no-go in cookie doughs. There’s just too much liquid involved, and it’ll ruin the consistency of the dough and the finished cookies.
That’s where the dehydrated strawberries come in. They’ve had pretty much all of the liquid removed from them. There are a variety of methods, but let’s get into the easiest way I know how to do it at home and why you would ever want to do this to your precious strawberries.
How to dehydrate your berries
Step #1 – Clean your strawberries
The first step whenever using any sort of fresh produce is to clean it. Most strawberry containers come with holes that are handy for draining excess water, so just pop the top and rinse them off with some cold water. We’re drying out the strawberries in the oven, so shaking and patting them dry is totally optional, but will obviously cut down on a little of the baking time.
Step #2 – Remove leaves and slice
Slice the tops of the strawberries off or use a straw to poke through the bottom of the strawberry and remove just the leafy green parts. Check out exactly how to perform that little food prep hack here (it’s a video).
I used about 10 strawberries for my purposes, and they filled up a regular sized baking sheet with plenty of room in between if I wanted to squeeze in more. The 10 strawberries made about 1/4 cup of dehydrated strawberry dust for my cookies.
Next, slice the strawberries into 1/4″ pieces. If you want to make pretty strawberry-shaped pieces, slice the long way. You can stand the strawberry on their top (where the leaves used to be) and slice straight down for uniform slices. If you want various-sized round pieces, slice across. Be careful not to slice through the berry and into your fingers!
Step #3 – Bake on a very, very low heat
Preheating the oven isn’t really necessary, but you can go ahead and get it to 200º F. That’s where it’ll stay for the next 3-4 hours.
Prepare a large baking sheet by covering it in non-stick parchment paper. I bought the Target brand, so you don’t need any fancy brand or anything. I also didn’t use any non-stick spray and the strawberries came right off when I needed to flip them (that’s the next step).
The strawberries will bake for about 2 hours before they start drying out.
Step #4 – Flip and continue dehydrating
About halfway through, when the strawberries begin to dry out, flip each strawberry slice over and continue baking. At this point, you can continue to bake until they reach your desire crispness.
As I said, I used mine in a cookie, so I needed them dry enough to be able to pulse into tiny pieces, but it wasn’t necessary to dry them out completely. This took about 3.5 hours total.
If you only want to dry them out a little for a cool snack, you might only need 2.5 hours. If you’d like to make legitimate strawberry chips, you may need up to 4 hours. Just keep an eye on them.
Note that any smaller or thinner pieces will dry out faster, so feel free to remove pieces as they reach your desired texture.
How can you use them?
Now that you have your dehydrated strawberries, what in the world do you do with them?
Make cookies, donuts, biscotti, muffins, and MORE. Pulse them down and stir into any number of doughs and batters to add bursts of bold strawberry flavor. Check out the strawberry cheesecake cookies in the shop that I make using this exact process.
Throw into or on top of smoothies & juices. Add some flavor and texture to your next homemade smoothie or juice blend.
Decorate cakes, pies & other baked goods. Use these dehydrated strawberries as a beautiful and interesting alternative to the fresh strawberry decoration on layer cakes, cheesecakes, etc. Pulse them down into a fine powder and use that to decorate like glitter or sprinkles.
Add to yogurt, oatmeal, cereal, granola. Any of these sorts of delicious meals can be taken to the next level with just a sprinkle of your dehydrated strawberries.
Whip them into a delicious strawberry frosting. Once in a powder form, these strawberries can be added to your favorite vanilla buttercream or cream cheese frosting to add loads of strawberry flavor!
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