What does a schoolchild’s packed lunch have in common with a $300-a-head meal at a three-Michelin-star restaurant? These days, both frequently include an edible leather: a puree of fruit (or, in the case of the restaurant, more often of a vegetable, such as tomato or onion) spread thin and dehydrated until it becomes stretchy.
Commercial fruit leathers roll out of factories by the yard, and those served at high-priced restaurants are prepared by expert chefs, so you might think that such a modern creation is beyond the means of the home cook. But it’s actually amazingly quick and easy to make an all-natural fruit leather that is a tasty, healthful and highly portable snack for the lunch box or backpack. My 10-year-old loves the mango chili leather.
And you can use the same technique to create savory vegetable leathers that add interesting, modern touches to traditional dishes. At The Cooking Lab, for example, we put tomato leather on lobster rolls. A little tangle of thin onion leather strips makes a terrific garnish for gazpacho or vichyssoise; apple leather pairs nicely with squash soup.
All you need to make your own leather is a blender, an oven and about 20 minutes of prep time. Edible leathers do need one to three hours to dehydrate — the thicker the layer of puree, the longer it takes to dry — but you can do other things while they sit in the oven. For these recipes, timing is not critical.
