Easy Banana Chips

Recently, in our area, bananas were on sale for 20 cents a pound. While our household can't go through that many bananas before they go bad, we can make a boatload of banana chips.

Many banana chip recipes call for soaking the chips in citric acid or lemon juice to prevent browning, claiming that if you don't, the resulting chips will be brown and nasty. However, if you have a food dehydrator, this is not necessarily the case.

In this Instructable I will show a very simple way to make a ton of easy banana chips without a lot of fuss.

You will need:

• Bananas
• Food Dehydrator (I strongly recommend the Nesco American Harvest)
• Dehydrator Clean-A-Screen Trays
• Sharp Knife
• Cutting board

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With a sharp knife and a cutting board, slice the bananas. The key here is to try to cut them in a consistent thickness, so that they will all dry at roughly the same rate. Ideally they should be cut thin, maybe a few millimeters thick, so that they dry in a shorter period of time and develop a nice crunch. If you cut them too thick, the outside will be crisp but the inside will be a little chewy.

Place the clean-a-screen trays on the dehydrator trays and cover them with the banana slices. You can arrange them fairly densely, and it is okay if they touch. Place the trays in the dehydrator according to the manufacturer's directions.

Set the dehydrator to 135 degrees Fahrenheit and dry for 12-14 hours. When they are done they will still be warm, and a little chewy. Once they cool however, they will develop a more thorough crispness.

When your chips are dry, cool, and crisp, remove the clean-a-screen trays from the dehydrator trays. All you need to do is fold them in half one way, and then fold them in half at 90 degrees to the first fold and all the chips should slide right off and through the hole in the center of the screens. You can see from the picture that the chips are a little browner than if they had been soaked, but not unappealingly so.

We bag them up in zipper bags and they keep for a few weeks. They can also be frozen and enjoyed later.