I bought a dehydrator... now what?

[TwilightJoy]

I'm so excited, my Excalibur 2900 dehydrator came in the mail today!

I've never dehydrated before, so I'm not really sure what to do. The trays look like they need some sort of liner or something on them so my stuff doesn't fall through. What do you use?

What do you guys usually dehydrate?

Thanks so much!

[dogmom327]

There are lots of cool things you can do with it:

--Make beef jerky (I use grass-fed ground beef mixed with Frontier's Simply Organic steak seasoning).
--Make pemmican (with ground meat, tallow and fruit)
--Dry sprouted grain so you can grind it into flour
--Make crispy nuts
--Make yogurt (use a canning jar and just set it inside and let the yogurt culture)
--Keep your cultures and ferments warm during the winter (like sauerkraut, kefir, kombucha, etc.). I find that with my dehydrator, if I barely turn it on, it stays about 75 degrees but you'll want to double check yours.
--Make fruit leather
--Preserve fruits and veggies (sundried tomatoes!)

If you are going to be making fruit leather or jerky, I would recommend either getting the Paraflexx sheets made by Excalibur or you can use unbleached parchment paper (not the greenest option though because it can't be recycled).

Hopefully that helps but let me know if you need more details. Congrats on your purchase!

[cristeen]

I dehydrate all my fruit. We get a CSA box, and we get far more fruit than we can eat, so I slice it up and dehydrate it. The trick to this is getting even slices, so they all dry in about the same amount of time. A mandoline or similar slicer is great for that... I use a Feemster's slicer, which is the same concept but only costs about $10. I try not to mix trays between fruits because different fruits take different amounts of time to dry. Like kiwis or bananas or pears are really high in water content, so they take longer to dry than say an apple. I don't add acid to any of my fruits - some of them brown a bit (like pears or bananas), but some don't (like apples).

[NoTiGG]

I just got mine too. So far I used it to dry sprouted grains so I could turn them into flour. Also oat groats to turn into partially ground oat porridge.

One other plan I have for it is soaking wakame which is a seaweed.. cutting out the stem.. then re dehydrating it. Because the texture of wet wakame is slimy and kind of gross.. but if you leave it dried then the stem is really too chewy and fibrous to really be edible.

I also used it to dry my spinach leaves after washing them so it would work better sauteing them.

I have a CSA share for the first time this summer and I plan on fermenting and drying everything I can't eat myself. It's all for me

[Laniemama]

All of dogmom's suggestions are great! I also make my own herbs and spices by dehydrating the herbs from my garden. Dehydrate and then make into a powder. I'm also planning on doing my own onion powder and garlic powder this way too.

[velcromom]

I just discovered Dehydrate2Store.com, lots of good ideas and I like that there are videos for a lot of things too.

[Feb2003]

this is going to sound bit weird, but in addition to foods already mentioned we have dehydrated green beans. Now, don't get me wrong, we all love them fresh-->steamed or right out of the freezer bag-->defrosted (which I believe are blanched first...I put them in my dss lunches frozen and they thaw by lunch!), but for travel or novelty...dehydrated beans are interesting!

I've also done granola...oh, and dehydrated sliced citrus fruits (skin on) make pretty ornaments or potpourri.