Review: Ronco Food Dehydrator and Fruit Roll Up Pads

Review: Ronco Food Dehydrator and Fruit Roll Up Pads
My toddler is a fruit snack junkie!  He will do anything for a fruit snack.  I wanted to make healthier fruit snacks and use fruits from my garden so I was excited to try the Ronco Food Dehydrator and Fruit Roll Up pads.  Second, my husband loves beef jerky and dried fruit so we figured that we could use this dehydrator for multiple purposes.  


There were two major questions that I had when I began this review:
1. Is it easy to use?
2. Is it noisy?


I found that it was super easy to use. (Check out the photos and description of how I used it below.)  I also liked that it wasn't too loud so I could keep it in my kitchen.


Fruit Roll Ups
The grocery store that we shop at had 8 pounds of strawberries on sale for $7 so we bought an entire flat to go wild on making fruit rollups!    Making the fruit rollups was super easy and they turned out really tasty! I plan to make more fruit rollups when the strawberries and raspberries from our garden are ready.  We simply (1) put a pound of strawberries in a frying pan to boil them down, (2) added 2 tablespoons of Agave syrup, (3) poured the mixture into the fruit rollup pad, and (4) ran the dehydrator for 18 hours. We did one tray to test it out and it turned out fabulous! As we guessed, my toddler went wild for these snacks. 


I was relieved that the dehydrator was reliable and that I didn't mess up the recipe.  I also liked the fruit rollup pad accessory because the fruit rollup peeled off easily.

Beef Jerky
My husband helped me with this review because he took it very seriously to make high quality jerky from the best ingredients! Making it took some time, but it was also easy and we plan to do it again.


We modified the Jerky Lover's Jerky recipe on allrecipes.com (http://tinyurl.com/bw6xubs) by doubling the recipe with 3 lbs of rump roast and omitting the pineapple juice (because I didn't have any).  It took about 24 hours to completely dry the jerky and I swapped the trays more frequently than suggested.  The result was good and next time I plan to experiment with less liquid smoke and more teriyaki. My husband has been snacking on this all evening and we were surprised that our toddler is in love with the beef jerky too!

We are very satisfied with our Ronco food dehydrator because it worked really well. We also consider that it doesn't make a lot of noise and it was easy to use.  Everything that we tried turned out well on the first use so no ingredients went to waste during our learning curve. We love that it allows us to prepare new foods that we otherwise wouldn't have made without the dehydrator.


Learn More
Ronco sells a variety of kitchen appliances and accessories.

I am appreciative of the free products that we received for this review. I was not monetarily compensated for this review and all opinions are honest and my own.