Oat bars and dried fruit

There are more and more of us who do not resign ourselves to eating processed products, those of us who enjoy making recipes at home, with healthy ingredients and without preservatives, and even more so if they are products that in theory are called "healthy".

That's why when it comes to looking for healthy snacks , I at least am very demanding. I love cereal bars, but I've always been put off by the fact that you don't really know what they taste like and that they have a lot of ingredients that you don't really know what they are, and when they have a certain fruit, I wish they had another one... In short, I'd like to know what I'm eating and also personalize it to my palate.

This is what I did today with these cereal bars thanks to the WMF dehydrator , which has allowed me to effortlessly not only dehydrate the fruit I used for these bars, but also make them the ideal size with the mould included in the dehydrator. It is a very simple recipe ; here we go:

WMF food dehydrator and Laura Ashley porcelain bowl

INGREDIENTS: (For about 14 bars like the ones in the photos)

• 150 g of oat flakes
• 80 g chopped nuts (in my case walnuts and hazelnuts)
• 180 g pitted dates crushed into a paste
• 80 g heather honey (you can use the one you like best)
• 50 g of dehydrated fruit chopped into small pieces (I used apple, persimmon, which is the season, banana and mango)
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 pinch of salt

PREPARATION

1. The day before, we dehydrate the fruit, cutting it to a thickness of about 4 mm and removing the core in the case of apples and the skin in the case of persimmons. We place it on separate trays so that the hot air can circulate and we set our WMF dehydrator for 8 hours at 70 degrees and forget about it. It will stop automatically when the time is up.
2. The next morning, ready to prepare our bars, we preheat the oven to 180ºC with top and bottom heat. We place the oat flakes and nuts on a tray covered with baking paper. We toast them for about 10 minutes, until we start to see the flakes turn golden. We take them out and let them cool a little.
3. We mix with the dehydrated fruits, cinnamon, salt, honey and crushed dates until we obtain a paste.
4. We fill the mold with it (included in the purchase of the WMF dehydrator ), cover it with film and put it in the freezer for 10 minutes.
5. We take it out, carefully unmold it and store it in an airtight box , separated by sheets of brown paper.

WMF food dehydrator

Tips:

• They keep well for about 3-4 days, if you have time to keep them at home that long.
• You may only want a mould for the bars. In that case, you can use the Mastrad mould. But if you don't have a mould, roll out the dough into a sheet about half a centimetre thick, put it in the freezer for 10-15 minutes until it hardens, and then take it out and cut it to your liking.