Gardeners, preservers and cooks all over the world know my pain when we spend years growing produce that needs to be preserved, only to end up with wasted fruit pulp.
This happens when cooking jelly and fruit syrup, sometimes cordial.
You go to the effort of growing the fruit, chopping it up, cooking it with a little water before straining it through a muslin cloth.
The strained liquid is turned into jelly or syrup, and then most recipes say to discard the pulp.
Well, I’ve just put my heart and soul into making jelly, leaving me with a strainer full of aromatic lemonade lemon pulp.
It's a shame to throw it out.
Years ago, I bought a dehydrator, one of those round plastic things where you layer trays to dry out fruit, with very little heat control and noisy as crap.
Luckily, if something needed to be dehydrated, it could be left running overnight in the studio kitchen and the household didn’t have to be kept awake by it.
The round dehydrator never really worked well for me, as it had to be run for days, so it found itself on the shelf in the storeroom, where utensils go to collect dust.
Then, early this year, my socials served me an ad for a food dehydrator.
And for the first time ever, I purchased something off an ad without thinking about it, which is surprising because I scroll through ads most days.
Looking like a mini oven, coming with trays, temperature and timer control and not at all noisy, my new dehydrator gets used all the time to make fruit and vegetable powders, dried fruits and fruit leather, and lives nowhere near the shelf where utensils go to collect dust.
I’ve used the new dehydrator to make strawberry, plum and raspberry fruit leather from the leftover pulp from jelly making, so why not lemonade lemon leather?
The lemonade lemon pulp was run through the food processor and then pushed through a fine sieve to end up with 1.6kg of smooth pulp.
You then add 150g of sugar for every kilogram of pulp, which equals 240g of sugar for 1.6kg of pulp.
To dissolve the sugar, the pulp was placed in a saucepan and warmed, and stirred until the sugar had completely dissolved.
The pulp was then spread on mesh silpats and placed in the dehydrator for eight hours at 55°C.
Then, it was rolled up and tied with a bit of baking paper and string.
There were six and a half rolls before I sampled some and used it to garnish an upcoming lemon yoghurt cake, which is why only five rolls are pictured.
It tasted a lot like dried peel, but with an extra chewy texture.
My only thought is that it could have used a little more sugar, making it more like a treat and less like citrus peel.
Stay tuned for the next edition of Jaci Can Cook when the lemon marmalade, lemonade lemon jelly, lemon curd and today’s lemonade lemon leather all come together to make a lemon yoghurt cake.
If you have a favourite lemon recipe, share it with Jaci at jaci.hicken@mmg.com.au
