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.
There are just three prep steps: prepare the fruit or vegetable by coring, peeling and dicing it; puree all the ingredients in a blender to a smooth slurry; then spread the puree in a thin, even layer onto a silicone baking mat. An offset spatula is an ideal tool for that last step, but if you don’t have one, you can instead wrap six to eight loops of masking tape around both ends of a ruler so that it leaves a gap of about 1/16 inch (2 mm) as you draw it across the mat.
Except for leathers made from fruits, like mango, which are naturally high in pectin, you’ll need to add a smidgen of gelling agent to the puree to get the right degree of stretchiness to the leather. Pectin can work, but its gelling strength varies greatly depending on the acidity of the puree. Xanthan gum, which you can find in the baking ingredients aisle of bigger grocers, performs more consistently. Xanthan is a natural product fermented from sugars. It is powerful stuff, so measure it carefully; use a digital scale if you have one.
EDITOR’S NOTE: W. Wayt Gibbs is editor-in-chief of The Cooking Lab, the culinary research team led by Nathan Myhrvold that produced the cookbooks Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and Modernist Cuisine at Home. Their latest book, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, will be released in October.
