Sun dried apples

We went and picked apples with friends a few weeks ago and I am still trying to figure out what to do with the bushel that I picked. I know, a bushel? Without a plan? But they were so delicious and the price was right and we drove out in the country to get them and what if I wanted more and didn't have time to go get more? So, I have made two quarts of  apple juice/cider, which lasted about two days, and have given away some, and I feel too lazy to make applesauce yet. I have been wanting to try drying fruit and thought this would be a great opportunity, but little did I know it would be such a pain to find the stuff to do it! One would think a piece of screen and something to cover it with to keep the flies off would work, but of course the more I read about food drying, the more difficult it appeared! Regular screen isn't good, it has toxins in it, food grade screen is required and is difficult to find, even online. Cheesecloth is good to cover the fruit, but more difficult to find locally than I anticipated. So I ended up using my oven rack to lay the apples on, Renee gave me a lead on a local source for the cheesecloth and I ended up with this:

That is two apples on half of the cheesecloth, I covered them with the other half and set them out in the sun for about four hours. This is what they looked like when I brought them in:

Yesterday, I set them out before I went to work, and of course, it is the only day it has rained in ages, and it poured for an hour before I got home, so I had partially rehydrated apples. I put them in the oven for about half an hour at 170* to dry them out a little so they didn't mold. I hoped that one more day in the sun-without rain- might finish them off. I changed things up a little, I put the apples on cake racks on a black cookie sheet with the cheesecloth over them. That worked like a charm!

At this point they are completely dry, just like you would buy in the store. I didn't add any lemon juice because we don't care if they are brown. If it looks like there are fewer apples rather than just smaller apples, you would be right, we kept sampling at each stage. I need to get more cheesecloth or a piece of muslin so I can do more at a time on the oven rack. We found that laying them directly on the cake rack caused them to pick up a bit of a metallic taste, so I won't do that again. Other than that, I think the experiment went well. I'm going to try again tomorrow!