You see the recipes everywhere online – is it worth your time?
More than likely you’ve seen the posts – ‘drying your own strawberries is easy and it tastes like candy!’ But is it true?
The process seems easy enough- set your oven on it’s lowest setting – 170 degrees, (or 200, if your oven doesn’t go below that), slice your strawberries, place them on on a baking pan, and wait. For hours. (Some recipes say three, some say four, but in all honesty, its something you want to check every hour anyway.) The result is a mix of berries that can range between chewy and crispy depending on how you cut them and how long they bake for.
(It’s important to note that dried or dehydrated strawberries are not the same as FREEZE DRIED strawberries, which is when the berries have no moisture at all in them, which is not something you can really do at home that easily – freeze drying is an expensive process which uses equipment that few of us can afford to put in our house. (This at-home freeze dryer costs over $2,000) But the truth is, the dehydrated or oven dried strawberries are delicious just as they are.
So what’s the verdict. Is it worth it?
The reality is, the process is easy. It requires very little work. For my test, I tried cutting the strawberries two different ways. Some recipes call for you to slice them into flat slices, others refer to cutting them into quarters. I thought I’d try both.
I set my oven to 200 degrees, and since I have a convection oven, I decided that yes, I wanted that warm air to move things along. I put the berries on a silicone nonstick baking mat – it stands to reason that fruit is going to lean towards sticking on a metal surface. I highly recommend the mat. Sticking was not an issue. Halfway through I did turn the flat berries over, and the quartered berries I simply shuffled around a bit.
In about three hours, they were done. They were delicious, although it’s important to note they will only be as delicious as the berries were before you dried them. If they weren’t super sweet to begin with, you might want to sprinkle a touch of sugar on them – but to me that defeated the purpose of making a more healthy ‘candy.’

Drying your own strawberries is easy, although it won’t produce a huge bounty unless you dry a lot of them.
Was it worth it?
Okay – here’s what I hadn’t expected – which was silly, because it’s SO OBVIOUS.
Sixteen ounces of sliced strawberries dried up until they are a shadow of their former selves is NOT GOING TO YIELD MUCH OF NATURE’S CANDY!
I mean, this should have been obvious to me! But factor in that you’re drying these things out within an inch of their lives, and also – let’s be honest – you’re snaking and testing them as you’re baking them – so next thing you know you have a handful of berry slices. Are the delicious? Absolutely!
Are you saving money? Hard to say. A 16 ounce package of strawberries cost me $3.50 the weekend I bought them. By the time I was done I probably had four ounces of dried berries.
This sixteen ounce package of dehydrated strawberries is available online for 12.99 – that’s the weight of the strawberries AFTER drying. Some of them run for twice that much.
A package of freeze dried strawberries – the ones that are crunchy and dry – can go for much more. Just two ounces costs 8 dollars. That’s a lot.
Would I do it again?
At first, I thought, NO. But damned if I didn’t find myself always going back to those berries and snacking on them. They were delicious. Does it taste like candy? Okay, calm down, it’s not candy, (and that’s a good thing.) It’s sweet and delicious. Not perfectly sweet, sometimes sour, sometimes slightly crispy, sometimes chewy… and I loved that. There was very little work involved, and the house smelled amazing. And lastly, the truth is I like doing this kind of thing. That’s why I’m here. That’s why WE are here. So why not? It’s fun.
So the verdict – make them, but make a lot of them. Eat them alone, put them on ice cream, and impress your friends – or at the very least – impress yourself.