Oven dehydrating strawberries

[Anonymous]

Please help me figure out what I did wrong! I had high hopes.
Picked fresh strawberries and followed a recipe online for dehydrating in the oven. Basically: slice thinly and evenly, lay out in one layer on parchment paper and put in oven for 2 hours at 200f.
At 2 hours, they were still wet and soggy so I added another. Then I had to go to bed so I turned off the oven and left them in there overnight. Still soggy in AM so I did another three hours. They are drier but now sorta gummy consistency and very dark. Definitely not the dry, chalky consistency when I get the dried strawberries in the bags from TJ.
Comments for the recipe suggest that many people were successful.
Here’s the recipe I used:
https://feedthemwisely.com/oven-dried-strawberries

[Anonymous]

OP here. Is the difference that the TJ are freeze dried? So oven dehydrated are goi g to be gummy?

[Anonymous]

Dehydrated food is chewy while freeze dried food is dry and crispy because freeze drying removes almost all of the water and dehydration removes only about 50-75% of the water.

[Anonymous]

What is the circulation like in your oven? My MIL has a dehydrator thing that has think racks stacked on top of each other and then it blows the warm air past all the racks. Strawberries would be left over night for 8-12 hours to get them crispy thin. My guess is your oven is not actually evaporating the water efficiently.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Dehydrated food is chewy while freeze dried food is dry and crispy because freeze drying removes almost all of the water and dehydration removes only about 50-75% of the water.

This sounds right to me.

I'm curious, what are you planning to do with your dehydrated strawberries?

[Anonymous]

Thanks! I started on the regular oven setting but switched to convection setting after the first hour hoping the circulation would help. Other than that, pretty standard oven. Maybe cooling racks would help air circulation? Although at this point I’m thinking dehydrating strawberries isn’t for me.
After cooling this time, most were fairly crisp but insanely thin. I feel like I lost a lot of the goodness in the juices that came out and dried up around them. Worth a try but I’ll stick to freezing them!

[Anonymous]

They will never be like tJs. Those are freeze dried. Dry and chewy is the best you can do. Still good tho. I usually do 8 hrs in oven.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dehydrated food is chewy while freeze dried food is dry and crispy because freeze drying removes almost all of the water and dehydration removes only about 50-75% of the water.

This sounds right to me.

I'm curious, what are you planning to do with your dehydrated strawberries?

OP here. Don’t have a good plan yet- at a minimum just snack on them or add them to bubbly water (my DD likes making fancy drinks). Two trays of slices only resulted in about half cup of dried strawberries so I’ll actually probably just snack on them today and tomorrow and that’ll be it!

[Anonymous]

Even with my oven that has a setting for drying fruit like this, it just will not come out the same as freeze dried fruit.