Instructions

1. Cook the carrots until they are genuinely soft — collapsing under a fork, not just tender. A blender will not break raw carrot down far enough, and fibrous flecks in a leather dry into hard splinters.
2. Blend the carrots, apple, juice, coconut, honey, lemon juice, pumpkin pie spice and cornstarch to the texture of apple sauce, and leave the dried grapes out. Blended in, they disappear; scattered on later, they stay as pieces.
3. Simmer the puree in a small pan for two minutes after it comes to the boil, stirring constantly. This cooks out the raw starch, and raw cornstarch tastes chalky and never sets properly.
4. Let it cool to lukewarm, then pour about a cup per leather onto a drying sheet and rock the tray gently until the surface flattens. An uneven pour is the main cause of a leather that is brittle at one end and wet at the other.
5. Scatter the chopped dried grapes over each leather while the surface is still wet. They need to sink slightly to stay put; sprinkled on a set surface they fall off in the bag.
6. Dehydrate at 125 °F for 11 hours, and judge progress by whether a corner lifts cleanly rather than by the clock. If it stretches as you pull, it is not ready.
7. Peel the leathers off and lay them on the mesh for a further 3 hours at the same setting. The underside has spent the whole first run sealed against a solid sheet and is always the damper face.
8. Roll each cooled leather in parchment paper and store the rolls in a sealed jar for a month, or in the freezer for six. The honey keeps these slightly tacky, so store them rolled rather than stacked, and check for any bloom before eating an old one.