How To Make Watermelon Taffy
An Excalibur Dehydrator Recipe
Summertime. Baseball and Watermelon.
If you have a big, juicy watermelon, have the little ones strip down to the diaper in the yard and just dig in. Spit seeds, eat it straight from the rind, and hose off before going back into the house.
That is the best way to eat watermelon.
We have some avid watermelon eaters around our place. Even yet, with a food co-op order yielding three very large organic watermelons in the same week, even my kids began to waver on their dedication to the cause. When life hands you watermelon, make taffy!
The word “taffy” is more of a descriptive term for the texture and candy-like result you get from dehydrating watermelon. This is not a true candy or taffy; for a dye-free and whole-foods family like ours, this is an awesome way to treat the kids with candy.
Tools:
Excalibur Dehydrator (they heat evenly because of the back-to-front design)
Paraflexx Sheets (this makes cleanup extremely fast & speeds up dehydrating time since the juice will not be re-wetting the trays underneath)
The “How-To”:
1) Quarter the Watermelon.
2) Using a sharp knife, slice the watermelon quarter into very thin slices, left to right (as shown). Doing this in the rind holds it steady for you and means you get the thinnest slices possible. Make sure that you are getting consistently thin slices; too much differentiation will affect the dehydrating time.
3) Slice the watermelon quarter once down the middle (how the knife is positioned in the picture).
4) Cut along the rind to release the triangular shaped slices of watermelon.
5) Dehydrate with the dial set to the low-end of the fruit range. Dehydrate it to your preference, but it will create a thick, chewy candy. You can dehydrate it for an extremely long time and never get this to a long-term food storage dryness.
6) Vacuum seal the candy in portion-sized bags, then freeze until ready to use them! They are good at room temperature for about 3 days.
Since we do not use food coloring, finding cute ways to decorate children’s birthday cakes is a constant struggle for me. I’ve tried a million things, but some natural alternatives leave strange flavors for a birthday cake (I over-did it on the beet juice one year). This is my idea for Bug’s birthday cake. She turns 5 in just 2 months; I have plenty of watermelon taffy in the freezer for this:
If you think of other creative uses, send us a picture or leave a comment!
Summer On,
Chaya
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