The dehydrator is useful for much more than making dehydrated fruit chips for snacking or dehydrating onion, garlic, mushrooms and aromatic herbs to always have them ready for your stews. With this recipe for dehydrated banana and cocoa crepes I hope to shed light on the possibilities the air dehydrator offers you, and of course I hope you enjoy very healthy, energizing and tasty breakfasts with them.
Preparing this batter for crepes takes you two minutes (if not less), and the dehydrator will do all the work.
Making fruit pancakes is easy: put the ingredients you will use for the pancakes into a blender or a food processor, apply the resulting batter to the dehydrator trays and dehydrate. Nothing else, let’s see it!
Ingredients to make healthy dehydrated pancakes or crepes
Today we make these pancakes with only banana (I'll leave the recipe below), personally it's one of the fruits I use most for making pancakes because it provides energy, sweetness (so I don't have to add extra sugar) and gives a fairly dense texture, which allows you to form the crepes without difficulty, since it doesn't run, it keeps its shape.
But besides using banana as a base for the batter, you can make the pancakes with:
- With fruits, from apple to cherries, banana, pear, blueberries, figs..., or mix several of them. Don't forget coconut, or dehydrated coconut which we often have on hand if you prefer.
- With nuts, which mixed with fruit will provide energy, essential oils for the body and wonderful flavors. From walnuts or hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, or raisins, dates... Add your favorite nuts to blend with the fruit and obtain the base for your pancakes.
- Without a doubt, you can add grains, from rolled oats to chia, flax seeds, etc.
Remember you can add honey, maple syrup or sugar to your mixes (without overdoing it or without it, since the fruit is already sweet), but using banana and dates in your recipes ensures a significant sweetening contribution in the most natural and healthy way.
How to make dehydrated crepes or pancakes
The idea is as simple as blending the ingredients with a hand blender or a food processor and spreading the resulting batter on the dehydrator trays, on baking paper and ensuring the air circulates. Let the dehydrator work for a few hours.
As a result, you get a kind of crepes or pancakes that will be more or less elastic depending on the thickness and drying time you chose, and I assure you they are ideal for breakfast, for a snack or to impress with a healthy, guilt-free dessert
Keep in mind that depending on the ingredients you use you will get a batter that is more or less dense. If it's dense, you can make pancakes (apply thicker layers), and if the batter is more liquid, the result will resemble a crepe, like the ones in today's recipe.
If you prefer, or the day you want a very crunchy snack or if you want to make decorations for your dishes, you can make very thin sheets to obtain thin, crispy sheets and decorate your meat and fish dishes, salads... or leave them on the table for nibbling alongside a spreadable cheese or hummus.
Also remember that the WMF dehydrator comes with a bar mold, precisely to make the most of the dehydrator's possibilities: you can make fruit and muesli bars or whichever you like: mix, press into the mold and put it in the dehydrator to dry.
Recipe to make dehydrated banana and cocoa pancakes
Ingredients
For the crepes:
- 5 or 6 ripe bananas
- 2 heaping tablespoons of pure cocoa*
*If you have quality pure cocoa and use two or three very heaping tablespoons, you will get a very intense cocoa flavor. If you use pure cocoa, I recommend that for the first pancakes you make you apply two level tablespoons of cocoa, so as not to overdo the intensity in the crepe.
To accompany:
To accompany these banana and cocoa crepes, I propose several options, although I'm sure you'll have other delicious ideas:
- Banana slices and maple syrup: the final result of the pancakes is already sweet given the banana base, but ideal for banana lovers.
- Banana slices and raspberry syrup or liquid chocolate: You can reduce the sweetness by adding more cocoa to the mix, or instead of honey or maple syrup accompany the pancakes with syrups that create more contrast than honey and don't sweeten them as much, such as raspberry syrup, an apricot jam or liquid intense chocolate.
- Raspberries or cherries and powdered sugar
- Orange, raspberry, peach or your favorite flavor jam.
- Nuts, such as chopped hazelnuts or almonds, together with fruit, jam or powdered sugar.
Preparation
- Peel the bananas, cut them into thick pieces and put them in the Magimix blender.
- Add the tablespoons of cocoa powder.
- Blend for one minute and set aside.
- Prepare the trays of the WMF air dehydrator with baking paper, and place a generous spoonful on each tray. With a spatula, spread the batter into a circular thin shape, about one millimeter thick. Fill all the trays, place them in the dehydrator and set to 70 ºC for 2 hours, then lower to 50 ºC for 5 hours.
- Ideally, rotate the trays from time to time to ensure they dry evenly (normally it wouldn’t be necessary, but when using baking paper it's better to move them in case the air distribution isn't homogeneous... although you'll see that all the crepes still dehydrate and the house smells fabulously good).
- When serving, remove the crepes from the trays and serve on a plate with your favorite accompaniment.
- Leftover crepes can be stored in the refrigerator in an airtight container.
If you don't have a food dehydrator yet, you'll see it's a very simple device. You only need to control the temperature and time you want the hot air that will dry the foods to circulate, and press the power button. Practice makes perfect, but remember the dehydrator already comes with instructions and a guide of ideal times and temperatures to use it, but you'll see that after very few uses you won't even need it).
I hope you are encouraged to try making these crepes and to explore the world of dehydrated pancakes. They are a very healthy, tasty, practical resource and it's endless.
