Dehydrating Strawberries

This year I want to have more varieties of things that I can snack on that I can also take with me when I go backpacking.  Dried foods of many kinds fit the bill for this so I will be experimenting with different foods as I go along.  This weeks experiment is dehydrating strawberries.  I have tried to dehydrate strawberries in the past with limited success.  The problem was that I was slicing the berries too thin which made them extra difficult to remove once they had dried down to little rock hard sheets of strawberries.  This attempt I tried slicing most of the berries in half, while the biggest berries were sliced a couple more times.  I tried to keep them consistently about 1/2 inch thick, which sounds large, but when strawberries dry, there isn't much to them, so a thicker slice should yield a better result.  The berry slices laid out on the tray looked lovely.

The smell that filled my home as these dried was delicious.  I only dehydrated two pounds of strawberries which resulted in only 3.5 oz of dried berries.  It wasn't even enough to fill a pint jar all the way.  The sweet concentrated strawberry taste is divine.  The dried berries can be eaten as is, or reconstituted and added to yogurt, oatmeal, or any number of desert dishes that call for strawberries.  I am probably going to make a dried fruit trail mix out of my recent batches of various fruits including these strawberries.  The next thing I want to try to make with strawberries is a fruit roll up.  That should be as easy to make as the peach leather was and I'm sure my food processor is up to the task.