Pumpkin Pie Bark

by: Olivia Georgitsos and Jessi Andersen

Rating: **

Ingredients:

·         1 15 ounce can pumpkin

·         ¼ Cup real maple syrup

·         2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice)

Combine pumpkin with maple syrup and pumpkin pie spice. Use real maple syrup for best results. Stir until ingredients are mixed well. You don't need to use a blender.

Spread thinly (about eighth inch) on dehydrator trays covered with Excalibur Paraflexx® sheets, parchment paper, or the fruit leather inserts that go with your dehydrator.

Dehydrate at 135° for eight hours until brittle.

After about five hours, flip the bark over as follows: Place a spare dehydrator tray on top of the Bark and flip the two trays over so that the bottom side of the bark is now facing up. This will ensure complete drying. 

Yield: One 15 ounce can of pumpkin barks down to 1½ cups weighing four ounces.

No Crust Pumpkin Pie (to rehydrate your bark if necessary)

Serves 1

Ingredients:

·         ½ Cup Pumpkin Pie Bark

·         ½ Cup water

Pumpkin Pie Bark dissolves in hot or cold water. If you want hot pie or pudding, stir the Bark with hot water until creamy. I use my candle stove to gently warm the water for pumpkin pie.

I eat it like pudding, but the photo shows that it is thick enough to shape into a wedge of pie.

For larger servings, combine with an equal quantity of water.

Garnish with chopped walnuts or pecans if desired.

     Overall, we liked this dehydration recipe. It wasn't one of our all-time favourites, but it wasn't horrible. It wasn't a very common recipe so we were definitely nervous about how it was going to work out. We did have to make some minor modifications to the recipe and cooking instructions. Firstly, instead of cooking the bark at 135 degrees Fahrenheit we cooked it at 170 degrees and we cooked it for a slightly shorter time period. We also added more maple syrup and cinnamon to make the bark taste better and to add flavour. In the process of making our food, we had to convert all of the ingredients measured in ounces to millilitres. The container sizes didn't exactly match up so we had to try to make sure the recipe had about the same ratio of all ingredients. While cooking our bark, we also realized that the quantity of the ingredients we used didn't have to be exact compared to the recipe. 

Backpackingchef.com, (2015). Pumpkin Pie Bark. [online] Available at: http://www.backpackingchef.com/pumpkin-pie-bark.html [Accessed 19 Jan. 2015].