Skills to Pay the Bills: Works in Progress

For Earth Day, instead of going to the one party in town at the Mandalay Bay Shark Reef, I decided to save my money and try something new.

1. I had some bananas.

2. The temperature broke 95 (high was 98) according to weather.com. It was close enough to 100 that I felt fairly confident I wouldn't die from bacteria creeping into my too-cold first experimental batch of potentially-awesome banana chips. (You see, a while ago, like back in January, I read that in order to solar-dehydrate stuff, it has to be a certain temperature or else...risk of death. I e-mailed a woman in town who runs dehydration classes, but she could give me no advice. As a former victim of Guatemalan amoebas [2007], I decided that my iron gut could handle the risks.) Therefore, I followed some instructions that I found online and sliced up two bananas into a lemon-water bath. Not pictured: two bananas. Pictured: part of one banana in a lemon-water bath after I figured out that I should take photos and TOTALLY blog my Adventures in Banana-Chip-Making!

3. I set up my solar dehydrator in a sunny corner on the patio, removed a tray, and arranged the banana slices fairly neatly. 

4. Then I popped the tray into the non-mechanical machine and zipped it up. 

Then I waited for hours (3) and flipped the "chips". Then I waited more hours (3 more) and here's what I found:

The lemony chips are quite delicious. They are NOT perfect. Read: I can't put them in a jar and sell them and/or barter them after the apocalypse comes and the schools shut down. 

Here's why they're not perfect, a.k.a. "What I Learned."

1. I think the bananas were just an inch past their prime. The articles I read on the internet to prepare for my experiment said that the bananas should be ripe but NOT overripe. 

2. My internet searches of the past have yielded recipes for how to make banana chips in a deep-fryer, in the oven, and in an electric dehydrator. My final source said to slice the bananas coin-thin. Since this source appears to be Australian, I assumed that meant "if you live in the desert," which I do. Perhaps coins in the outback are thicker than ours. Next time, I will cut a thicker chip and begin the process earlier in the day. As you can see, at the time of the photograph, the SUN is actually not shining down on the solar dehydrator. 

3. I put the banana slices on nothing, since my dehydrator shelf is well-ventilated. You're supposed to put them on parchment paper, but I was well into the process before discovering that I was out of parchment paper. 

4. Solar-dehydrated banana chips are not like store-bought. I was prepared thanks to my aforementioned source for more of a "leathery" consistency. If you're trying this at home, you should be prepared, too. 

Really, folks, there's not a lot of information out there about how to use the solar dehydrator without dying.

Hopefully my experiment can contribute to the extant bank of knowledge. As the summer continues to only get hotter in the coming weeks, I will try banana chips again. I will ALSO try making fruit leather, which I like to call "homemade fruit roll-up."

Satisfied that I had tried something new, I then proceeded to unceremoniously break one of my pre-form arrowheads during flintknapping practice. I'm going to keep trying on that front, as well. After all, in the immortal words of Wayne Gretzky, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."