Use your solar oven as a food dehydrator to make homemade, healthy baked apple chips. Food dehydrators can be noisy and cost money to operate. Use your silent solar oven as a free-to-use food dehydrator and save money preserving the apple harvest. Plus, you can do small batches all throughout the year to always have healthy snacks on hand.
If you’d like to learn more about various methods of outdoor, off-grid cooking be sure to check out our book, The Do It Yourself Homestead! With 400 pages of homesteading information, presented on four different levels of homesteading experience, you’re bound to find something you’ll enjoy!
Are Apple Chips Good For You?
Apple chips are worth taking the time to make, especially during apple harvest when they’re much cheaper.
- Apple chips are a wonderfully healthy snack that is universally pleasing – even the baby loves apple chips.
- They’re Paleo, GAPS and whole foods approved.
- They’re easy to make, too, requiring only a minimal amount of equipment; you’ll need a cutting board, a sharp knife or apple slicer and some kind of food dehydrator.
- You can also preserve small batches in any food dehydrator to have on hand for snacks throughout the year.
- As Shelle Wells points out in her book, Prepper’s Dehydrator Handbook, dehydrated foods can add significant security and health to your food storage program.
Choosing Apples for Apple Chips
Sometimes it’s tempting to just throw whatever apples you have into the dehydrator, regardless of what condition they’re in. As Shelle Wells reminds us in her book Prepper’s Dehydrator Handbook
“Begin by choosing firm fruit that is at the peak of ripeness and flavor. Handle it gently to reduce the possibility of bruising, and process it as soon as possible after you bring it home. If you find some of the fruit has become bruised or is overripe by the time you get to it, process it as fruit leather.”
If you try to use bruised or smushy apples for apple chips you’re going to be very frustrated as you try to cut them uniformly and dry them well. Save yourself the headache and use quality fruit.
—>>>Click on the link to learn to make fruit leather. <<<—
If you’re new to dehydrating or just want to explore how to use your electric dehydrator more, be sure check out Shelle’s book. Even if you decide to just use your solar oven for dehydrating, there’s a lot of information on methods, food selection, storage tips and food uses. I use Prepper’s Dehydrator Handbook all the time to inspire myself to try new dehydrated foods and methods. It’s full of the same common sense advice you’ll find on her website Rockin W Homestead.
How to Cut Apples for Apple Chips
The easiest way to cut apples for apple chips is to use a spiral slicer that’s made to evenly slice apples and even potatoes. These slicers can be found at just about any home or kitchen store. If you don’t want to invest in one, your sharpest kitchen knife will suffice.
You can also try a mandolin slicer but be sure the blade is sharp and the apple is very firm or you will get mixed results.
However you slice your apples try to make them as uniform in thickness as you can. If each slice is about the same thickness, then they will dry at about the same rate. This will mean they finish dehydrating at the same time and you won’t have to pick through each batch looking for slices that are still wet.
Uniform thickness = time saved!
Which Food Dehydrator to Use?
The hardest part about making apple chips is the drying process and each food dehydrator dries food for storage a little differently. There are basically three kinds of food dehydrator to choose from:
- Dehydrator unit
- Conventional oven
- Solar oven
- Homemade solar dehydrator
I usually use my Excalibur dehydrator for most items. However it does take a bit of time to dehydrate apples in it and it’s noisy. Plus, while it’s in use, it’s sucking energy from the wall.
A solar oven operates as a food dehydrator with only the power of the sun, which God made free to all. Certainly a mark in favor of the solar oven process.
If you don’t have solar oven, you can make apple chips with the following:
- Use our step by step tutorial to learn to make apple chips in a dehydrator – bonus, you’ll learn how to make a light apple cider vinegar with all thee leftover scraps, too!
- Visit Paleo Leap to learn to make apple chips in an oven.
To learn to make your own solar dehydrator if you live in a dry climate, grab Prepper’s Dehydrator Handbook
Solar Oven Air Circulation When Used as a Food Dehydrator
The only part of the process of using your solar oven as a food dehydrator that’s different with making solar oven apple chips as opposed to electric-dehydrated apple chips is the set up inside the oven.
Setting up the apples correctly inside will provide proper air circulation for even and prompt dehydration.
Each solar oven is shaped a little differently. My S.O.S brand solar oven is rectangular sloping down from top to about 8 inches from the bottom.
Look at what you have to decide how to ensure that the air moves around your product inside the oven. The idea with using your solar oven as a food dehydrator is to get your food as exposed to the air as possible while venting the moisture.
Using Racks Inside your Solar Oven for Bigger Batches
You can certainly do only one layer of sliced apples, laid out evenly on a baker’s rack in the bottom of your solar oven. If you’re family is small for apple amount is small, that might be enough for you.
I need to process bushels of apples most years and I feed seven people. Consequently, I need to dehydrate my apple chips in the biggest batches possible. Here are some handy tips for doing that using baker’s cooling racks:
- If you have a stack-able cooling rack (with several baker’s racks attached to each other in a stack) that will fit inside your oven, then use that to ensure air movement around your product.
- Use regular baker’s cooling racks and stack them with items placed in between for spacing. For example, I don’t have stack-able racks, so my engineer husband used one of our small baking stones to balance a regular baking rack over those apples layered on the bottom.
The first time we tried dehydrating, I put the bottom layer of apples on a silicone mat and they dried pretty well but were still a bit on the soft side. The apples that were on the top rack were perfectly dried and crispy. The key to good dehydration is excellent air circulation around the product.
Solar Oven Moisture Escape When Used as a Food Dehydrator
When you use your solar oven as a food dehydrator, you have to vent the lid so that the moisture will escape. Solar ovens do really well at keeping moisture in, which is usually a good thing and one of the best parts of using a solar oven for regular cooking.
When dehydrating, though, you want all the moisture to escape by providing a way for it to vent out of the oven, without releasing all of the heat. To do this:
- Find a heat-resistant object that is between 1/2 inch to 1 inch thick.
- Wedge it it between the lid and edge of your solar oven.
- Double check that it stays put the whole time you’re dehydrating.
We wedge a baking stone on one side of the oven between the lid and the rim of the oven body. We secure the solar oven clamps all over the unit, except where the stone is wedged. The stone stays wedged just fine and moisture evaporates out during the drying process.
Whatever you choose to use as a wedge, make sure it can take the extreme heat that it will be exposed to in the solar oven. Those things get toasty!
How Long to Dehydrate?
You might read that apples can take 24 hours to dehydrate in a solar oven. It depends a lot on where you live, how sunny the day is and what the ambient temperature is.
Living in the dry, warm climate of Utah our apple chips are done in about six hours. If you live where it’s more humid or the sun keeps ducking behind clouds, it will take longer.
To refresh your memory on how to correctly use a solar oven, please visit this post from Sun Oven.
To improve and lessen dehydrating time, be sure to use a slicer to get each apple piece that same thickness. The apple chips will dry evenly and quickly if they’re a uniform thickness. About 1/8th of an inch thickness will give you a nice sized apple chips that dehydrates quickly.
I highly recommend a consistent thickness of whatever product you’re trying to dehydrate. If the pieces are of uneven thicknesses, they will dry at uneven times and you’ll have to babysit your batch. It’s a lot easier to have everything finish dehydrating at the same time.
How to Store Apple Chips
As we wrote in our original apple chip post, it’s important to store your dehydrated apple chips as quickly as possible after they’ve cooled. If you live in a dry climate, your air will be more forgiving if you have to leave your tray of apple chips for a few hours. If you live in a humid climate, it’s very important that you don’t allow dehydrated food to sit out.
As Shelle Wells writes in her book Prepper’s Dehydrator Handbook
“Take it from my experience: if you leave your dried tomatoes on the counter overnight in a humid house, they will need to be reprocessed a second time the next day. Think of dehydrated food as a moisture sponge; it loves to absorb liquid and humidity.”
Shelle suggests storing your dehydrated foods in glass jars with tight lids directly after dehydrating. You can keep your eye on the jars for a few days and look for any condensation on the glass; if you see water collecting, you will need to re-process your apple chips.
If there’s mold present, dump the batch in the compost and try again.
After you’ve double checked that they’re dry, you can store your apple chips in any air-tight container. Consume them within the year for the best taste.
I’ve Tried This and It Doesn’t Work!
I was having a conversation about using the solar oven as a dehydrator with my friend Amber from My Homestead Life. She mentioned that, although she’s tried several times, she’s never been able to get this to work. She said that every time she has dehydrated with the solar oven, stuff was still too wet to be considered dehydrated.
After chatting, we got to thinking that this problem was probably a result of her humid summer climate. Because outside air is being pulled into the solar oven, very humid climates will only be able to provide wet air in the convection process. This will keep the food wet!
If you live in a humid climate, all is not lost! If you still want to save on electricity, you can begin the process in the solar oven and then pop the produce into your regular oven on its lowest setting, or into your electric dehydrator. This will finish the process and crisp up your apple chips!
This can also be helpful if you’re overwhelmed with the harvest season’s preservation efforts and you need to move at least one thing out of the kitchen!
More Apple Stuff
If you still have some apples leftover after dehydrating all you’ll need, try these:
Apple Resources
Apple Cider Soap Recipe
Preserving apples in a no waste kitchen – can, dehydrate, freeze, and ferment
I have been enjoying looking through your website. I am always happy to find people of faith that are helping us become more self sufficient.
We live in central Missouri and enjoy the small acreage God has given us to use.
Keep up the good work.
Nancy
Thanks so much, Nancy! We’re loving Missouri so far. I’m not big on the humidity with the heat, no surprise, but we have loved absolutely everything else. So beautiful!