Interested in a sweet and delicious way to use up an abundance of cherries? If so, you’re in the right place! In the article I’ll show you how to make cherry fruit leather in a food dehydrator.

Also, if you’ve ever made fruit leather and ended up with a sticky, stubborn mess on your dehydrator trays, you’re not alone. Because of that, when dehydrating this batch of cherry fruit leather, I experimented with a few different ways of preparing the dehydrator trays to see which way worked best. Not only did it turn out delicious— I found one way in particular that made it easy to peel the cherry fruit leather off the tray.

Let me walk you through the simple ingredients, the step-by-step process, as well as tips on how to keep fruit leather sticking to the tray.

Why Make Homemade Cherry Fruit Leather?

Homemade cherry fruit leather is a great way to use up extra cherries, especially when they’re in season and plentiful. It’s free from artificial sweeteners, dyes, and preservatives—just real fruit and a couple of simple ingredients to help with texture and shelf stability.

It also makes a fantastic snack for kids (or adults!), and it’s easier to make than you might think.

This article includes affiliate links.

Cherry Fruit Leather Ingredients

Fresh cherries – I used 4 cups of pitted cherries. If you’re using a cherry pitter (I love this one – Amazon), it makes quick work of the prep.
Lemon juice – Just 2 tablespoons adds vitamin C and helps preserve the color and quality.
Cornstarch – I added 1 ½ teaspoons, which helps the fruit leather stay flexible and less prone to cracking when you roll it up. It also helps to thicken it up a bit before dehydrating, which helps it to dehydrate a bit faster.

Why lemon juice and cornstarch?
While many fruit leather recipes skip these, I find both ingredients really helpful. Lemon juice adds vitamin C and helps preserve color. Cornstarch improves the texture and prevents cracking, which is especially helpful if you want to roll them up for storage or lunches.

How to Dehydrate Cherry Fruit Leather

Now let’s get into the step-by-step process of making cherry fruit leather.

Pit the Cherries

You’ll need to start off by pitting the cherries. Other than the actual dehydrating process, this is the most time-consuming part of making cherry fruit leather.

The best way that I’ve found to pit cherries is to use a cherry pitter, that pits multiple cherries at a time. This is the cherry pitter that I use, that you can pick up on Amazon.

If you don’t have a cherry pitter, and you have a bunch of cherries staring you in the face that you need to preserve sooner rather than later, the videos below show a couple of methods for pitting cherries without a cherry pitter.

Preparing the Cherry Puree

Creating the cherry puree for your fruit leather is super easy. Simply dump the cherries, lemon juice, and corn starch into a blender or food processor, and run until you get a smooth texture.

Here is a top view of the ingredients in the blender. You can’t see the lemon juice because it went down to the bottom of the blender, but it’s there!

This is what the blended cherries look like. On the sides of the blender you can see there are some small specks, which is totally fine.

Next, pour the puree into a stainless steel pot and bring it to a boil.

This is the cherry puree in a stainless steel pot before I turned on the heat.

I started with medium high heat, stirring fairly frequently before it came to a boil.

It only took a couple of minutes before it started to simmer.

Once boiling, reduce the heat and let it simmer for 2 minutes, stirring frequently.

I reduced the heat so that it was just high enough to maintain a simmer. At this point, I set the timer for 2 minutes.

This short cooking time helps thicken the puree slightly and activate the cornstarch. In terms of consistency, you want the cherry puree to be the consistency of apple sauce. Not super thick, and yet not thin and watery.

Here’s what the cherry puree looked like after simmering.

The consistency after simmering was thicker – but thin enough that it dripped off a spoon easily. If it was really watery, I would simmer it a bit longer, but that wasn’t necessary.

Allow the mixture to cool before spreading it onto dehydrator trays.

Since I made a small batch, I used my Cosori mini dehydrator (Amazon), which is perfect for smaller amounts and uses less electricity than a full-size dehydrator. This is also a great dehydrator if you want to keep a dehydrator on your kitchen counter for frequent use, and don’t have a ton of room in your kitchen.

If you’d like to learn more about the Cosori mini dehydrator, I have two articles that you may find helpful:

My Experiments With Keeping the Cherry Fruit Leather from Sticking on the Trays!

As I mentioned earlier in this article, in the past I’ve had problems with fruit leather sticking to trays. So when I set out to make the cherry fruit leather, I decided to try a few different methods to see which worked best.

Parchment Paper

The first method was to put parchment paper on the fruit leather trays, and the put the cherry puree on that. This is the method that is recommended in the recipe book that comes with the Cosori mini dehydrator.

One thing I don’t like about the parchment paper method when used with fruit leather is that due to the dampness of the cherry puree, as soon as I poured the puree on the parchment paper, it started to wrinkle.

Plastic Freezer Bag

The second method is one I read about in the Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook by Tammy Gangloff, that you can pick up on Amazon. That book is my go-to book when it comes to all things related to dehydrating food.

In the book she states:

Less expensive alternatives to drying sheets are. . .large ziptop bags cut open to make one large sheet. . . if there is any print on the bag, face it away from the food, otherwise it will transfer to the leather when it is peeled away from the plastic.

In my case, I just used the part of the bag without any print, so I didn’t have to worry about the print transferring. Note that this ziptop bag method worked great for my mini dehydrator trays, because they are small. The bag may have been a bit small for full size dehydrator trays.

Spreading a Small Amount of Oil on the Tray

The final method I tried to keep the cherry fruit leather from sticking to the tray is I spread a TINY amount of oil on the tray. The downside of this is that any fat in dehydrated food potentially reduces the shelf life of the dehydrated food, so you’ll want to use as little oil as possible.

A little bit of oil on a fruit leather try to keep the fruit leather from sticking. — While this may look like a fair amount of oil, it was about the size of a dime.

I used my fingers to spread it on the tray, so there was just a light covering of oil on the tray.

Spreading the Cherry Puree on Fruit Leather Trays

Regardless of which method above you decided to go with, it’s now time to spread the cherry puree on your fruit leather trays.

First, let’s talk about the amount of cherry puree per tray. since I was using the mini-dehydrator, I used 1/2 cup of fruit leather per tray. If you are using a full-size dehydrator, I recommend using 1 cup of fruit puree per tray.

To spread the cherry puree evenly on the trays, I recommend first pouring the fruit puree in strips on the sheet. This gives you a head start in getting the puree evenly spread on the trays.

This is what it looked like after a few good whacks on the table. You can see that while it did help distribute the cherry puree, it still wasn’t completely distributed on the fruit leather tray.

Next, whack the trays on the table to help evenly distribute the fruit leather. To be honest with you, regardless of how much I whack the trays, while it helps, it still doesn’t completely distribute the fruit leather throughout the tray.

The same thing happened when I wacked the trays with cherry puree on the oiled tray and on the tray lined with plastic.

Because of that, the next step that I recommend is to tilt the tray back and forth, from side to side until the puree is as even as possible.

This is what the cherry puree looked like on the oiled tray after tilting. Note that I intentionally didn’t go all the way to the edge because I wanted something to grab onto to remove the fruit leather once it was mostly dry. With the lined fruit leather trays, this process is a bit easier because you can remove the fruit leather on the plastic or parchment paper and then work on removing the fruit leather from there. But with these trays having a lip on them, it’s hard to pull up the fruit leather if it goes all the way to the edge.

After that, I whacked it on the table again for good measure, which did help get it more even.

This is what it looked like on the plastic bag, after I did some tilting. I tilted it a bit more to get it to spread out further, but as you’ll see in the partially dried photo below, I left a little space on the edge to make it easier to remove.

You can also use a spatula (an offset spatula such as these on Amazon) to help smooth out the puree.

Dehydrating Time and Temperature

I set the dehydrator to 135°F and initially set the timer for 6 hours.

However, I started checking around the 4.5-hour mark, and here’s what I found:

Fruit Leather on Parchment Paper

By far, the “wettest” of all of the cherry fruit leather was on the trays lined with parchment paper. I also don’t like the less than smooth look that results from the parchment paper getting wet.

First, I checked the cherry fruit leather that I had placed on the parchment paper. As you can see in the photo above, the parchment paper wrinkled due to the moisture of the cherry puree. I believe because of that, it was thicker in spots and was still damp in the thicker spots.

Fruit Leather on Oiled Tray and Plastic Freezer Bag

The cherry puree that I had put on the plastic bag was quite a bit dryer than it was on the parchment paper. It was still a bit tacky to the touch, but not bad. It was also nice and smooth.

cherry fruit leather on a tray that was spread with oil and one that has the cherry fruit leather on a plastic bag. — On the left is the cherry fruit leather that was on the oiled tray, and on the right is the fruit leather on the plastic bag.

Similar to the fruit leather that I put on the plastic freezer bag, the fruit leather on the oiled tray was also quite dry, but still a bit tacky in spots.

Beginning to peel cherry fruit leather from a tray lined with a plastic zip-top bag. — While I was able to start peeling the fruit leather off of the plastic lined tray, I felt some resistance, and since I didn’t want to tear it, I decided to give it more time to dry before trying to remove it from the trays. I had a similar experience with the other methods.

It was dry enough for me to lift about 1/4 of the leather off without tearing, but when I hit a wet spot, a small amount stuck on the tray, so I knew it wasn’t dry enough to peel off.

Peeling cherry fruit leather from a fruit leather tray that has a little bit of oil on it. — The fruit leather on the oiled tray pulled up easier, but as you may be able to see on the right side, just below the part pulled up, there were a few specks of fruit leather on the tray. That was the point where I was starting to feel some resistance, and again didn’t wan to tear the fruit leather so I stopped.

I put all of the fruit leather trays back into the dehydrator for another hour.

Cherry Fruit Leather After 6 Hours in the Dehydrator

Peeling cherry fruit leather off of the lightly oiled dedhyrator tray.

After 6 hours in the dehydrator, all of the fruit leather was dry enough to peel off the parchment paper, plastic wrap, or oiled tray.

By far, the easiest one to peel off was the cherry fruit leather on the slightly oiled tray. I was able to pull it off very easily, with very little resistance.

The next easiest one to peel off was the fruit leather on the parchment paper. I had to be careful with it, but it came off pretty easily.

The hardest one to peel off was the fruit leather on the ziptop plastic. Part of the issue was that the plastic was so thin and flexible, I found it hard to grab onto the fruit leather. However, once I got it going, it came off pretty easily.

Transfer the Fruit Leather to Mesh Trays

At this point the fruit leather was very close to being dry, but it was still tacky in spots.

Because of this, I flipped the fruit leather over (so the bottom side was up so it could dry better) and put it on mesh trays so it would get better airflow.

It was interesting to me that the parchment paper was stained by the cherry puree. In addition to not liking the way that the parchment paper caused the fruit leather to wrinkle, I also wonder if I lost some of the “cherry goodness” to the parchment paper.

Cherry fruit leather transferred to a mesh dehydrator sheet to finish the drying process. — This was the fruit leather removed from the oiled tray and put on the mesh dehydrator tray. You can see that there are little bits of fruit leather on the tray, in spite of it being oiled. The lower part was due to trying to remove the fruit leather at 4 1/2 hours in, when it was still damp.

This is the fruit leather that was dehydrated on the plastic bag. You can see that there are some tiny specks of fruit leather on the plastic. Like the oiled tray, this was from when I tried removing the fruit leather at 4 1/2 hours in. You can also see that the fruit leather on the plastic was a little wrinkled, but not nearly as bad as the fruit leather that was on the parchment paper.

I dehydrated it for an additional hour or so, until there were no longer any damp spots.

After that, they were perfectly dry—pliable but not sticky.

Cherry fruit leather that was prepared 3 different ways. On the left is fruit leather that was dried on a plastic bag, in the middle is fruit leather that was dried on a tray spread with oil, and on the right is fruit leather that was dried on parchment paper. — Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the cherry fruit leather that was put on trays three different ways. On the left is the fruit leather that was on the plastic ziptop bag, in the middle was the fruit leather that I put on the oiled tray. And on the right is the fruit leather that I put on the parchment paper. I like the more smooth look of the plastic wrap and oiled tray much more than the fruit leather that was dehydrated on parchment paper. But the taste was the same in all of them.

Storing Your Cherry Fruit Leather

Once cooled, I did a few things:

Cut each fruit leather into fourths (remember, these are mini trays).
Stored some flat in a Ziploc bag with wax paper between layers.
Rolled others up in wax paper and cut into strips for a classic fruit roll-up look.

A piece of cherry fruit leather cut into 4 parts with each part placed on a square of wax paper. — I used kitchen scissors to cut the fruit leather into for pieces. If using a full size dehdyrator, you may want to cut it into more pieces, but this was a good size when using the mini-dehydrator.

The cherry fruit leather that was cut into 4ths and placed on wax paper in a sealed ziptop bag. — I then put the fruit leather squares in a ziptop bag. Since there is wax paper in between each piece, I didn’t have to worry abou them sticking together.

A sheet of cherry fruit leather placed on a large piece of wax paper. — If you prefer the fruit roll up style, start by placing the fruit leather on wax paper or parchment paper.

Cherry fruit leather being rolled up on a piece of wax paper. — Next, roll it up.

Cherry fruit leather rolled up in wax paper that has been cut into 1 1/2 to 2" pieces. — Finally, cut them into pieces that are your desired length. I did mine between 1 1/2 and 2″ long.

If you’re planning to store these long term, skip the oil and use parchment or plastic. But for short-term snacking, and a moderate storage life (e.g. months instead of years) a touch of oil makes cleanup and removal so much easier—and it’s unlikely to affect shelf life much since it’s such a small amount.

Tips for Fruit Leather Success

Use cornstarch and lemon juice for better texture and preservation.
Spread puree evenly by tilting and tapping trays.
Lightly oil trays for easy removal (or test your favorite method!).
Flip and finish drying on mesh trays to avoid any sticky undersides.
Store with wax paper to keep pieces from sticking together.

Ready to Try It?

This cherry fruit leather was simple to make, packed with flavor, and didn’t end in a tray-scraping headache. If you’re curious how it all comes together, check out the step-by-step how-to card below.

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Yield: 5 small or 2 regular size fruit leathers

How to Make Cherry Fruit Leather in a Food Dehydrator

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Learn how to make cherry fruit leather at home using a food dehydrator. This step-by-step guide shows you how to prep cherries, blend, dry, and store homemade fruit leather that’s flavorful and easy to remove from trays.

Prep Time 10 minutes

Active Time 10 minutes

Additional Time 6 hours

Total Time 6 hours 20 minutes

Difficulty Easy

Materials

4 cups pitted fresh cherries
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1½ teaspoons cornstarch
Wax paper or parchment paper (for storing or rolling)
Optional: parchment paper, plastic freezer bag, or small amount of oil (for lining trays)

Tools

Cherry pitter
Blender or food processor
Stainless steel pot
Food dehydrator (mini or full-size)
Dehydrator fruit leather trays or liners
Offset spatula (optional, for smoothing puree)
Mesh dehydrator sheets (optional, for final drying)
Kitchen scissors or knife
Zip-top bags or airtight containers (for storage)

Instructions

Pit the cherries
Use a cherry pitter to quickly pit enough cherries to yield about 4 cups.
Make the puree
Add pitted cherries, lemon juice, and cornstarch to a blender or food processor. Blend until smooth.
Simmer the puree
Pour puree into a stainless steel pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 2 minutes, stirring frequently. Let it cool slightly.
Prepare dehydrator trays
Choose a method to prevent sticking:
1. Line trays with parchment paper
2. Use a cut plastic freezer bag
3. Lightly oil trays with a very small amount of oil
Spread the puree
Use ½ cup puree per tray for a mini dehydrator (or ~1 cup for full-size trays). Spread puree evenly using tray tilting, tapping, or an offset spatula.
Dehydrate
Set dehydrator to 135°F and dry for about 6 hours. Check after 4.5 hours—leather should feel dry but flexible.
Transfer and finish drying
Remove fruit leather from trays, flip onto mesh dehydrator sheets (bottom side up), and dry for 1–1.5 more hours if needed.
Cool and store
Once fully dried, let cool. Cut into pieces or strips. Store flat with wax paper between layers or roll up in wax/parchment paper.

Notes

Cornstarch helps prevent cracking and improves drying.

Lemon juice boosts flavor and preserves color.

Oil allows for easier removal but may slightly affect long-term storage.

For longer storage, use parchment or plastic lining instead of oil.

Store in zip-top bags or airtight containers with wax paper to prevent sticking.

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💬 I’d love to hear from you!

Have you tried this yourself? Have a question or tip to share? Leave a comment below — your experience or question could help someone else, too!