Plum Fruit Leather

Author Notes

I love to make fruit leather. It’s an extremely rewarding project with very little active time and requires little effort. It’s a great way to use in-season, juicy fruits, but it works just as well with thawed frozen fruit, too. You can adjust the sweetness level to your liking: adding more sugar will make a leather that tastes a bit more like a chewy candy-like treat, but you can just as easily rely on the natural sugars of the fruit and add very little (or none). Like anything made with fresh fruit, the precise cooking time of this leather is somewhat difficult to predict. Different kinds of fruit are juicier, and some will thicken a bit more naturally due to the makeup of their particular combination of flesh, skin, and/or seeds.

Plums—and other varieties of stone fruit—contain a high amount of natural pectin, which makes them easier to make leather with. You can use other fruits instead (even ones that don’t have a naturally high pectin content) but that little bit of extra help thickening—and a great place to start learning the visual cues, which are essential to knowing when your leather is done (you don’t want to rely on time alone). The fruit leather is made by puréeing the fruit and spreading into a thin, even layer on a baking sheet. While you can use a dehydrator for this, I usually make one big tray in my oven instead. As the fruit slowly dries at low heat, the excess moisture evaporates, ultimately leaving only the fibrous parts of the fruit mixture behind. The juicier the fruit/more liquid the pureed mixture, the longer it will take to dry out and become the leathery texture. In the recipe below, I’ll recommend a time to start “checking” it.

To check the leather, use a small offset spatula to lift up the leather at one of the corners. This should happen easily, and the leather should bend and be flexible. If it is soft or seems moist, keep going! —Erin Jeanne McDowell