Dried home-made apple chips

An easy home-made snack for apple season! 

My mother-in-law was very proud of her home made apple-chips last christmas and they were indeed delicious; tasty, chewy, sweet and sour. I decided I want to try this very simple recipe, too and right now the markets are full of fresh, yummy apples. Here in Berlin it's easy to find organic apples so our treats will be pesticide and preservative free, which I value.

As far as I know there are three different ways to dry the apples: hanging them to dry in room-temperature, drying them in the the oven or using a food dryer. The oven seems like the least ecological choice, but is also the easiest one. For comparison we also left some to dry in room temperature but that was slow and felt a bit... dusty.

Dried apple chips

5 big organic apples
organic lemon juice
(sugar and cinnamon)

Prepare a bowl of water and add lemon juice, one tablespoon per 100ml water. This will keep the apples from turning brown. I also added a sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar because my apples were quite sour.

Wash the apples and carefully remove the cores with a core remover or a knife. Slice the apples into thin rings, about 2-5 millimeter thick, if you can. Plop them in the water as you go.

If you hang your apples to dry using string, pat them dry first and make sure to hang them slightly apart. Hang them on a clothesline or clothes rack, for example. This will take a few days. You can also leave apple slices to dry lying flat on baking paper, but I'm sure this is even slower.

If using an oven, line up the apple slices in rows on multiple baking trays and fill the oven as well as possible. Heat the oven to 50°C. It took about 6 hours to dry the apples in our oven. If the oven isn't a fan oven you should leave the oven door open from time to time to let the humidity out. Rotate the trays every few hours as the top one will dry the quickest.