Arts &Crafts, How-To's, Upcycling & Repurposing

Hello everyone! For a while now I keep seeing articles on using fruit powder in your food. People were putting it in their yogurt, oatmeal, baking breads, etc. To continuously by a bag of fruit powder, approximately 7 ounces, ranges online from $14.00 – 30.00. That’s a lot of money if you think about it. I figured I’d try my hand at making my own. There’s a delicious bread I’ve made that calls for orange zest. This would be perfect in that! Or yogurt and even oatmeal. 

I’ll tell you; this was super simple to do. The boring part was waiting till you had enough peels to do this.

There are a few ways you can dry your peels. If you have a dehydrator, an oven, an air fryer/toaster oven or you have the option to let them air dry. The kids & I eat oranges a lot. So I just save the peels.

Supplies Needed:

Orange Peels

Orange peeler – optional

Parchment paper

If using a dehydrator, then that or your oven

Jar with lid

Coffee grinder or food processor

Step 1-

You will start by peeling your orange making sure there’s little to no orange on the peel. Once that is done you lay parchment paper on a cookie sheet/pan and lay your orange peels on that.

Now for me, I gathered orange peels for 1-2 days so the peels were already started to dry.

I used our toaster oven/all in one electronic. Literally, you can do so much with this, including dehydrating.

I pushed the dehydrate button and put the peels in there for starting at 60 minutes. After that was up, I checked on it, flipped them over and put them back in for another 30 minutes. If using a regular oven, preheat your oven to the lowest setting, around 140 degrees F. Checking it at 1 hour and going from there. I have heard leaving the oven door ajar a tiny bit to allow for moisture to escape.

If you have a dehydrator, follow the instructions on the manual. We do have a dehydrator but in all honestly, I did not feel like going downstairs to get it and setting it up, finding the manual, etc. It just seemed like more work than what I felt like doing. PLUS, not everyone has a dehydrator. 

Step 2-

Once your orange peels are % dry, you can put them in either a food processor or a coffee grinder. My food processor kicked the bucket and I have used my grinder to grind other things beside coffee beans before. This did the trick just fine!

Step 3-

Put the orange peels a few at a time, put the lid on and start grinding! If it didn’t look they were “powdery” enough, I stirred it up, put a couple more peels in and continued the process until all the peels were done. 

That’s it! I have put some in vanilla yogurt and it was so good! Try this out and I hope you guys enjoy this as much as I did.