My father is an avid mushroom enthusiast, and he spends most of his free time either foraging or preparing delicious mushrooms that he picked himself. Recently, he purchased a food dehydrator and successfully dried a few batches of mushrooms, which we use in our cooking (Note: ground dried mushrooms are really tasty on homemade pizza). I immediately started thinking about how to utilize this new toy, and after writing down a few of (very cool, if I say so myself) ideas, I started easy: bananas.

The dehydrator is of circular type, the manufacturer is Gorenje, and the model is FDK500GCW. It contains five perforated plastic trays, and its power is 380W. This dehydrator has an adjustable temperature option – minimum 35 °C, maximum 70 °C, in increments of 5. It also has an adjustable timer – 0.5 h to 19.5 h.

I used two medium to large sized bananas, and the total weight was approx. 300 g (I do have a scale, but the pointy banana ends, and some bruised parts of the bananas weren’t used, so it’s an approximation at best, which is good enough in my book). The bananas were ripe, but still pretty firm.

The bananas were cut into approx. 0.2 cm thick slices, by hand. The slices were pretty thin and flimsy to work with, so I opted not to treat them with any antioxidants (lemon juice, ascorbic acid, citric acid, which are commonly used in home drying for this type of work) that would prevent browning and probably preserve some aroma.

I arranged the banana slices, leaving lots of room. I left so much empty space on each tray that if I arranged them the “right” way, I’d probably end up using a tray or two, instead of four that I used in the finished setup.

The dehydrator settings I used were 4 hours and 60 °C. After the 4 hours, I rearranged the trays, so that the previously bottom tray is at the top, and vice versa. Then I let the dehydrator do its magic for 3 more hours.

Final result: 50 g of product. This would indicate that the moisture dropped to around 12%, while fresh bananas contain around 74% water. The finished product was slightly crispy, but mostly chewy. Two more hours would probably make the slices crisp up a lot more, but I dislike that form of dried banana slices, because they’re often too hard and lose almost all of the aroma. The taste of my banana slices was mild, and very concentrated. I reckon these slices would go well with a bowl of cereal or cooked oats.

The little banana experiment was successful. I plan on using this dehydrator for some innovative ideas in the future.