Autumn Olive Fruit Leather

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This simple autumn olive fruit leather is made from the delicious, nutritious, anti-oxidant packed berries of an invasive shrub. Because autumn olive is invasive, it is abundant and easy to find. Forage for it, but do not plant it, because it crowds out native plants Transform a pest into a resource with this recipe.Autumn olive fruit leather has become popular wild fare, and for good reason. The invasive autumn olive shrub (Eleagnus umbellata) produces delicious, anti-oxidant rich berries. If you could eat them by the handful the way you eat blueberries, fruit leather would be unnecessary, but these tiny berries have seeds that are too annoying to chew in quantity. That’s my opinion — there are foragers who can pop them by the handful and swallow the seeds. But I think the majority of foragers consider autumn olive berries most useful as a puree with seeds removed.  And a puree is just what you need to make fruit roll-ups. It’s also great for jam, and if that’s your thing, check out my Autumn Olive Jam Recipe.

Foraging for Autumn Olive Berries

Autumn olive berries can be quickly harvested in great quantity. To learn to find, identify, and harvest them, see my post on Autumn Olive: Foraging for Autumnberries. To learn more about responsible foraging, read Foraging Ethic.

Harvesting autumn berries is not without controversy. Some people favor chemical control of this invasive plant, and fear that encouraging consumption of autumn berries will encourage people to plant it. That would indeed be a problem. However, something about chemical control of an excellent food plant bothers me. Most of our food crops are chemically maintained, because they cannot stand up to pests and/or weeds. And now we’re going to chemically maintain even non-agricultural plants, by poisoning edible invasive plants? Sorry, that doesn’t fly with me. Let’s eat those plants which grow successfully without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. That could help reduce our dependence on chemically maintained agricultural mono-crops.

Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, but I think people can learn that it’s okay to forage for invasive species, but not a good idea to plant them. Of course there will always be those who do whatever they want without regard for anything or anyone else, but there isn’t much we can do about them. Finally, it’s worth noting that the field of permaculture challenges the orthodox view of aggressive non-native species, as you can read here.

So, have you got it down pat? Autumn olive an aggressive non-native species which can crowd out native plants which are desperately needed by our native insects, birds, and so on, throughout the food web. Foraging it can help reduce it, as long as you don’t plant it. Most environmental scientists think invasive species are harmful, but others challenge that view.

To Boil or Not to Boil Autumn Berries?

I have read several times that the seeds can be removed from the pulp by passing fresh berries through a food mill or strainer. But even a food mill didn’t process the raw berries very well for me, so I didn’t bother with the strainer. The food mill yielded nearly clear juice with a bit of pulp. It was obviously going to take a long, long time of turning that crank to get most of the the pulp through, so I decided to boil the berries.

One advantage to boiling the berries is that it kills the seeds, which can then be tossed into the compost, without propagating this invasive species. If you do not boil them, you should dispose of the seeds in the trash.

I added a cup of water to my 9 cups of berries, but if you stir and mash continuously as you bring them to a boil, the berries will quickly release a lot of juice, and you can probably get away with adding less water. And less water would be better, because it would reduce the drying time.

To Sweeten or Not to Sweeten?

Autumn berries are quite tart, which may or may not appeal to you. Some foragers delay harvesting till after a frost, because they prefer the slightly sweeter flavor. I, on the other hand, think they begin to taste rotten after a frost, so I pick them as soon as they are deep red and plump. For this recipe, I picked them a little sooner than usual – some berries were not quite deep red. They were very tart, so I added a little honey to the puree. But if you pick them when fully ripe, you might not want any sweetener at all. If you do choose to sweeten, honey is better than sugar, for the latter tends to make fruit leather brittle.

Some autumn olive fruit leather recipes call for lemon juice. I don’t know why. Autumn olive is flavorful and tart enough without it.

Autumn Olive Fruit Leather

Makes 2 fruit roll sheets of fruit leather, using a circular Nesco dehydrator.

  • 9 cups autumn olive berries
  • 1 cup water (try adding less, if you want – see “To Boil or Not To Boil”, above)
  • 2 tbsp honey (or to taste)
  1. Bring the berries and water to a simmer over high heat, while stirring and mashing the berries in a large pot.
  2. Reduce heat and simmer for 7-10 minutes, or until most berries have burst.
  3. Pass the boiled berries through a food mill to remove seeds. You will have thick mixture that might tend to separate into a red pulpy layer and an almost clear watery layer.
  4. Stir honey into the warm puree to taste.
  5. Spread the puree onto 2 fruit roll sheets lightly greased with a vegetable oil spray (or a paper towel moistened with a bit of vegetable oil), place each sheet on a dehydrator tray, and dry at 135-140 degrees F until fruit is no longer sticky. OR, spread puree on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper and dry in oven at 135-140 degrees F, or higher if oven cannot maintain that low temperature, until fruit is no longer sticky. In my dehydrator at 140 degrees F, it took about 10 hours to dry.
  6. Cut fruit leather and roll it up as desired.
  7. Store in an air tight container. If fruit leather is still slightly tacky, it’s safer to store in freezer (which I do).

Got something to say about autumn olive? I welcome comments, questions, and lively debate, but they must be communicated with tolerance and respect. Anything offensive to me or anyone else will be promptly deleted.

This simple autumn olive fruit leather is made from the delicious, nutritious, anti-oxidant packed berries of an invasive shrub. Because autumn olive is invasive, it is abundant and easy to find. Forage for it, but do not plant it, because it crowds out native plants Transform a pest into a resource with this recipe.

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Comments

Autumn Olive Fruit Leather — 23 Comments

  1. I just made my first batch of autumn olive fruit leather this season too! With berries that were a little underripe, because my son didn’t want to wait another week or two for his favorite seasonal food. I reduce the tartness by adding an apple (cut into small chunks) during boiling. this mellows it a little and adds a hint of sweetness without adding actual sweeteners, which we try to avoid. I hope to go out picking more today!

    • That’s great, Kim! I add apples to my autumn olive jam (for the pectin) but didn’t think of adding it to the fruit leather. But our apples are quite tart at this time of year, anyway, so I’d have to buy them to get apples sweeter than the autumn olive. Happy foraging!

  2. I love fruit leather. I never trust myself in figuring out which little red berries are actually edible to humans. Do you know off hand some small red berries that are TOXIC to humans?

    • Hi Monica, Yes! There are plants with “mildly poisonous” red berries and leaves similar in appearance to those of autumn olive. Someone recently sent me a photo of a plant with red berries and asked if it was autumn olive. It looks similar, but it was amur honeysuckle, with mildly toxic berries. I always advise people who want to learn to forage to get serious about learning plant identification. Get some books, take a course, and find the local foraging experts in your area. Foraging workshops are sprouting up all over the country. You should be very confident about the ID of a plant before eating it.

  3. This looks delicious. I would love to try it. Would the leaves be useful in a hot compost pile as a nitrogen additive. I would be shredding them. Do you know if the leaf contains tannins?

  4. I constantly spent my half an hour to read this weblog’s articles everyday along with a cup of coffee.

  5. I appreciate this view. Where I live wineberries grow wild. I’ve since found out that they are invasive. They are delicious though, and one of the highlights of summer. Plus, I don’t have to maintain them at all.

    I need to put wineberry fruit leather on the “to do” list.

  6. Hi Janet
    I came across your blog today while looking up fruit leather to make in my new dehydrator. I think it is funny that only in the few last years autumn olive berry is being used here in the USA.I was born and raised in Portugal and since I can remember we ate the Berries and my mom made jam which I have been making all my adult life. My mom and her siblings used to eat the fresh berries with bread while in the fields helping my grandfather. I make my jam without apples since the berries have enough pectin and it sets beautifully. I use this jam to fill cookies “delicioso” …I live in Fitchburg and likewise have a little over an acre but enough for garden and fruit trees. Thank you for making the autumn berries known as edible and healthy with more lycopene then tomatoes and thanks for the recipe

  7. Pingback: Everything You Want to Know About Super Autumn Olive Berry + Bonus: The Easiest Autumn Olive Fruit Leather Recipe - Wellness Geeky

  8. I have just finished putting up 15-1/2 pints of A/O fruit spread. I boiled the berries and ran them through a food mill, then measured the amount of juice/pulp. I followed the directions in Ball’s Low Sugar Pectin. For 8 cups of puree, I used 6 Tbsp of low sugar pectin and 5 cups of sugar. You could use honey or another sugar substitute or less sugar if you want a tarter spread. It is great on toast and I think it will enhance the flavor of wild game if served with biscuits. There are still a lot of berries, so I might try a fruit leather. A quick way to pick them is to clip the entire branch and strip them into a larger container. I used a shallow box.

  9. Very excited about jam and the leather from these berries. I just recently found out what these were. They’re all over and we keep pulling them out. Now I will keep some so I can harvest them. They’re actually a pretty bush but very invasive. Thank you for your recipes.

  10. Just made two batches of A/O jam, first with Certo and second just boiling it down. Second batch came out much better. Now going to try the fruit leather because 15 minutes of foraging using Larry’s method above yielded 40 cups(!) of berries!
    They are my daughters’ new favorite fruit (even though I’ve been telling them for years they were delicious ?)

  11. Pingback: How to Forage Autumn Olive (Identify - Harvest - Preserve - Recipes)

  12. Spraying a paper towel with oil before dehydration does not work! I wasted my entire batch of berries. The sheets stuck to the paper and absorbed ?

  13. i am excited to try this recipe! have never made fruit leather of any kind but have been making autumn olive jam for years now–love it!!! just want to say it is really delicious when mixed with wild concord grapes(often growing in close proximity to one another and ripening on similar schedule in my area of eastern connecticut)–there seems to be less milky white liquid when combined–and a gorgeous color too! thanks! happy eating everyone!

  14. one more thing! do you all know about pomono pectin? can use with no sugar any other sweetener(honey, maole syrup, stevia–anything!) or no sweetener and your jam will jell

  15. one more thing! do you all know about pomono pectin? can use with no sugar any other sweetener(honey, maole syrup, stevia–anything!) or no sweetener and your jam will jell

  16. We have just picked 6 large bowls here in SE Poland. Willbe made into juice and some frozen. An extremely healthy fruit but I note the comments abiut it being invasive but I think our cold winters will keep it in check.