Dried Orange Slices

♫ Listening to: (You Never) Turn Around by Spunsugar ♫

My dad has an orange tree and gave me the biggest bag of oranges recently. I ate as many as I could, but my fridge is only so big and I didn’t want them to go bad, so I thought this could be a good way to preserve some, while also making a cute treat to mail to Zen and Izzy for Easter. I bought my excalibur dehydrator 20 years ago, and it still works just as well as it did the day I got it. I highly recommend this brand if you are in the market for one. If you want to make these but you’re not ready to invest in (yet another) kitchen appliance, you can dry your orange slices in the oven using the lowest temperature your oven will go down to (and for about a third of the time).

If you’re looking for other dehydrator recipes, you can check out my pizza crackers recipe (please excuse the terrible photo quality of those crackers, but I posted that recipe 7 or 8 years ago when I was taking pics with my phone in a house surrounded by the shade of redwood trees (and apparently with my eyes closed, haha).

If you’re looking for a less healthy (and more delicious) version of candied orange slices, you can make traditional ones with sugar using a modified version of these strawberry ones. These dried orange slices or the candied orange slices can be used to decorate your other foods, like I did with this lemon bundt cake.

This recipe makes 36 sugar-free candied orange slices.

Candied Orange Slices Ingredients

• 6 oranges
• 1 tablespoon of sweetener (I used cassava syrup, but agave or liquid stevia also work)
• vegan food coloring (this is optional and is just for making them different colors)

Candied Orange Slices Directions

Peel only the very outer layer (the orange rind part) of the orange, using a vegetable peeler or a knife.

Slice the oranges.

Spread the orange slices on dehydrator trays. I used 6 oranges and filled up 1 and a half dehydrator trays, so you can double or triple this recipe if you happen to have a lot of oranges to use up.

Mix a teaspoon of your favorite sweetener (I used cassava syrup because it doesn’t have much of a flavor) with some vegan food coloring in small oven safe porcelain ramekins or bowls. Do this for as many colors as you want to use. I made 3 colors, and I wanted mine to be colored with superfoods, so I used pink pitaya powder for the pink, maqui berry powder for the purple, and blue spirulina for the blue. (If you don’t have cassava syrup you can use agave, stevia, monk fruit, etc.)

Spread the coloured sweetener on the orange slices, using either a silicone basting brush or the back of a spoon (or even your finger).

Dehydrate for around 12 hours if the dehydrator is set to 115º (or less time if you turn it up to 140º). I did mine at 115º so I could preserve the nutrients and the enzymes to make them healthier.

Eat immediately or give them away as gifts like I did. They should stay good for a few weeks after making them, as long as you don’t live in a super humid area without air conditioning.

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