Dehydrated Banana
March 1, 2010, Submitted by: Lauren (Mrs. MSB) Tweet
Dehydrating your own food is a great way to save money and to add to your food storage preps. By being frugal and taking advantage of food sale prices, or by preserving your food during harvest, you can build up a nice inventory of fresh foods to eat during off-season, or to simply add to your food storage to help you be prepared.
For example, we recently purchased a large quantity of bananas while they were on sale for 44 cents a pound. Since we both like to snack on dehydrated banana chips on occasion, dehydrating them was the perfect thing to do. We will keep some banana chips out in a zip lock bag for snacks, and we will also add some more to our food storage.
The recipe is simple. Just slice the banana into 1/8 inch slices, about the thickness of two quarters. Then place the slices on the dehydrator tray, set the temperature to about 120 degrees Fahrenheit (about 50 degrees Celsius), and dehydrate until leathery. Thicker slices will take longer.
The time to dehydrate depends on how juicy the food is, the thickness of the pieces, the humidity or moisture in the air around you, and the temperature setting of the dehydrator. For these particular banana slices, it took about 10 hours in the Excalibur dehydrator.
Excalibur 3900 Deluxe Series 9 Tray Food Dehydrator – Black
Excalibur 3500 Deluxe Series 5 Tray Food Dehydrator – Black
We like to store many of our dehydrated foods in mason jars – canning jars. The lid keeps the air out, and the glass is perfect for quickly identifying what is on the shelf. For very long term food storage, vacuum seal bags are the way to go.
This video illustrates the simple procedure to dehydrate bananas using the Excalibur dehydrator.
Awesome banana chips. My family loves them!
@ M. Charlot. Thank you! It’s hard to keep them in stock. You should try the strawberries too. They’re great in cereal and yogurt. Check out the posts regarding dehydrated strawberries.
Found a banana slicer at “Bed Bath and Beyond” for about $9. Sure makes slicing fast and the slices are uniform, about 1/8 inch thick. (No adjustment of thickness is possible.) To accommodate the curved nature of bananas, the slicer does only a section at a time – it takes 3 or 4 clicks of the slicer per banana.