Dried Apples and Apple Chips

I showed you the GIGANTIC bag of apples I picked up on our recent trip to Michigan and after canning 20 Quart Jars of applesauce I decided to mix things up a bit and make some dried apples.  I filled my food dehydrator and then decided I wanted to compare what would happen if I also put some on a cookie sheet in the oven on 200 overnight.  We decided that they were both very tasty but I think I liked the cookie sheet ones for thier apple chip crunch. 

 How did I do it?  Very simple.

I have an apple peeler, corer, slicer that I bought years ago at a pampered chef party and I love this little piece of kitchen equipment.  I don't usually peel my apples but since I don't think these were pesticide free apples I just opted to get rid of the peel to help offset anything we would be ingesting that I wasn't aware of.  So first I peeled, cored and sliced the apples into rings (a process that takes about 30 seconds with this lovely little gadget.

after peeling, coring and slicing the apples I soaked them in 1 part lemon juice and 2 parts water to keep them from browning too much.

I put half of the apple rings into my food dehydrator and the other half I used a cookie drying rack on top of my cookie pan so that the apples were not laying flat on the pan and had air circulating under them to dry them out quicker.  I left these in the oven overnight at 200 degrees and they were ready in the morning.

Like I mentioned, I liked the oven apple rings the best because they were crunchy, the ones I put in the food dehydrator were leathery.  Both were delicious and a great snack, I just like the crunch the best.  But, alas, for all the work it was to make these, they literally lasted 1 day at our house.  As I write this these are all that is left out of about 10 apples worth...my kids sure did snack well today!