Tales of a busy dehydrator: Experimenting with rehydrating food
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Kitchen equipment | 13 comments
Photo: Dehydrated celery leaves
“Can I eat any of this food when it’s fresh or does it all have to be dehydrated?”
Danny examined the bulging carrier bags carefully.
I’ve been discovering the delights of buying fruit and vegetables on offer to dry for use later in the year. This will have an enormous impact on our food bills and will guarantee that we have the best seasonal foods available all year.
We’ve also been dehydrating a lot of our own tomatoes, summer squashes, apples and pears. So for the first year ever there’s no waste. It makes fast work of drying herbs and these are packed with flavour. Super fresh dried mint to add to my mint and apple jelly. We’ll be storing any surplus vegetables from our winter kitchen garden in this way.
But the best thing of all is that the dehydrated food takes up so little space. Carrots are reduced to teeny specimens suitable for the dolls house. We have now have enough dried fruit and vegetables to feed us for months and they take up the space of a large sweet jar. It’s important to note the before and after weight of things to be able to judge how much dehydrated food to add to a dish. 180g or two Romano peppers weighed just 20g when dried.
At one stage I got a bit panicky about the electrical cost of running the dehydrator and then discovered that it’s just 2.5p an hour. Also now the evenings are getting chilly it heats the kitchen too. Determined not to put on the central heating, Danny searched the fridge last night for something to dehydrate.
Our Westfalia food dehydrator is the cheapest and most basic model available but once I got the hang of which layer dries fastest it’s a doddle to use. OK, food has to be cut into slim pieces (an eighth to a quarter of an inch) and sprayed with lemon juice to retain the colour. But when it comes to using the dehydrated food I’ve discovered that, as all the preparation of the fruit and vegetables has been already done, it’s so quick and easy to prepare a meal.
One of my favourite dehydrate2store videos is the one where the lady stands in front of a row of cock pot slow cookers and makes several stews and soups using raw meat and dehydrated ingredients. In fact the dehydrate2store website has given me loads of recipe ideas. Iif you are interested in the process it’s well worth a visit.
This week I fancied making a sausage casserole in the slow cooker and regretted using all our fresh red peppers in the pork risotto the night before. Then I remembered that I had some dehydrated Romano peppers in the larder so bunged them in along with some ground dried celery and a small handful of dehydrated mushrooms and tomatoes. Not wanting to bother with chopping and frying an onion I tossed in some dried onion. I added a jar of our own home grown tomatoes and enough hot water to rehydrate the vegetables.
Having assured Danny that rehydrated food tastes great I secretly wondered whether it actually would.
So it was with some trepidation that I lifted the lid four hours later and took my first secret tentative bite. All the dehydrated ingredients had rehydrated well and the dish was delicious!
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Having dropped some very heavy hints, I got a Westfalia dehydrator for my birthday. I’m just trying it out, but it’s incredibly noisy – is yours?
A very interesting read…
I bought a dehydrator years ago and had fun ‘playing’ with it.
I might just nip out to the garage and look for it!
Hi Sue
I reckon that a cheap one will pay for itself in no time at all. I love mine and it’s saving us so much money already.
Now I really have to get a dehydrator. I’m not sure visiting your blog is cost effective!!! VBG.
Hi N16annie
What a shame about your plums 🙁
Lucky you though having quinces – our tree died this summer.
I’ve really got into dehydrating. It’s simple fun and cost effective.
Hi Niki
I bought a great book The Dehydrator Cookbook by Mary Bell (it’s an American book) which gives loads of information, recipes etc. Also I watched quite a few of the dehydrate2store videos on YouTube (these are free and fun to watch). The combination seems to work well for me – the videos for inspiration and the book for detailed knowledge.
Hello Ceridwen
Great that you’ve got a dehydrator – we can compare notes. At the moment I’m storing the food in food quality ziplock bags. I try and squeeze as much air as possible. I’m planning to transfer these to jars later on. The lady on dehydrate2store uses a vacuum packing machine – no shekels to run to that ATM. She also uses food quality dioxidizers in her jars (I have found some on the web but can’t find the link just now). I think the latter would be a good investment.
I’m also drying all the food so that it is quite hard and snappy. Apparently you cannot ‘overdry’ food. Obviously if you are going to use the food quickly then the drying needn’t be so rigorous. Semi dried pears are delicious but have to be eaten in a day or two.
Hi S.O.L
Rehydrated tomatoes in a dish look and taste like fresh tomatoes that you sliced and added to the dish. Most food looks the same as it was before it was dehydrated. The YouTube dehydrate2store video number 9 http://www.youtube.com/user/Dehydrate2store#p/search/1/XT46lEuKtp4 shows the results well – go to six minutes into the video.
I haven’t tried a solar dehydrator yet. Or drying stuff on trays in Jalopy but next summer I’d like to combine sun drying and the dehydrator. I reckon that the dehydrator is essential as it’s not dependent on the weather and is easy to use.
Hi Catalina
I whizzed over to your site to get the recipe for dried onions (thank you) and was amazed that you have snow! It was only a few weeks ago that you were harvesting all those tomatoes.
Great post!
Aren’t dehydrators amazing!
I just posted a recipe for dried onions-it’s the simplest thing ever, but they are so good,
You can add them to EVERYTHING!
I am interested in the texture when rehydrated and how it looks. for instance, dehydrated tomatoes, do they give the same flavour and texture as a canned tomato?
(interested in tomatoes as we use these nearly everyday)
Also have you tried a solar dehydrator and if so what were the results like?
Much questions. maybe I should have put this in the forum. At work so wont allow me access.
I shall be watching your adventures with a dehydrator with interest – as I’m experimenting with food preservation myself and, to date, it would appear that drying food is the most foolproof way of storing food (no health hazards/less trouble/takes less space to store) – so I have got out my own dehydrator and am experimenting. I will be interested to see how long it all lasts.
What would be useful is details of how precisely you store the foods that you have dehydrated – standard plastic containers/freezer bags/glass jars or whatever….
I do alot of canning and some dehydrating, but never for the purpose of rehydrating, so this is interesting to me. I would love more info on what you have dehydrated, how you rehydrate, ratio of water to stuff, how much dried stuff to use etc. Have you got a good resource books/site? Or…fancy a tutorial? 🙂
Thanks and blessings,
Niki
Thnaks for this, I am so pleased to find this dehydrator. Trying to creatively use the last of a bumper 25 kilo crop of Victoria plums last month, I had a go at oven drying them. Sadly, the trusty Reader’s Digest ‘Food from your Garden’ failed me here. Despite hours at my oven’s lowest temperature, I ended up throwing away some sad furry little prunelets a week later. They were just too moist to store. The Food from your Garden advice is bootlegged in many places on the web (being out of copyright) and must trap a number of the unwary. I plan to lash out on a dehydrator and try this with the last of the bumper crop of 15 kilos of quince.