Dehydrating Foods
One of our favorite snacks is dried tomatoes. Unfortunately, it's also a kind of pricey snack. Happily, it's not that hard to dry your own, and if you garden, it's not very expensive.
This week I dehydrated two pints of cherry tomatoes for a snack. I cut them in half, used the sharp wedged end of a tool created for carving pumpkins and watermelons to cut out the center pulp and seeds, and put the halved and hollowed tomatoes face down in the trays of my dehydrator. I rotated the trays once during cooking and moved the tomatoes on the outside edge of the tray to the inside, and they were all done in about 24 hours (some of them were done in 12 hours).
My dehydrator came from a thrift shop and The Rattery (I had two, one from each place. The heater pan from one broke, so I combined the trays to make one large dehydrator). But I didn't have to have one to dry my own foods. I used to do this in the oven. I mainly did it for long tent camping trips, as dehydrated foods save space and are light weight. This year I want to do more of this so I have delicious home-grown tomatoes or fruits all winter long.
The first time I researched this for a camping trip, I read that you can use your oven or two window screens in the sun. I read that if you could sandwich the food between the two screens to keep the bugs away, propped the screens up on two saw horses or the backs of two chairs (or even two to four cinder blocks) you could dehydrate foods quickly in a dry climate. I didn't live in a dry climate. I lived in Washington state on the Puget Sound. I still don't live in a dry climate, so I never tried it..
The first thing I dehydrated in my oven was beans.
First I bought regular dried beans- not canned. A one pound bag of dried beans will make 7 or 8 cups of cooked beans.
Next I cooked up a mess of beans.
I drained them well, very well.
Seasoned them to taste with salt and herbs.
Spread them out on my broiling pan (you might want to oil it)- the pan that probably came with your oven. It's a big thing, and it has two parts. The top has slits in it to allow grease from broiled meat to drip down into the drainpan beneath. Beans are not going to drip, but they do need heat on all sides.
Spread them on the pan so none of them are touching, and dried them out in a slow heated oven (about 150 degrees).
I read that this would take at least two hours, probably more (again, it depends on the bean). I watched mine and turned them around with a spatula or wooden spoon every hour or so. They were done when they were small, dry and hard, like pebbles.
They were also very lightweight. They cooked up again much faster than dried beans will, conserving my camping fuel. I could rehydrate them by bringing some liquid to a boil in the morning with our coffee and oatmeal, pouring it in a thermos over the beans and letting them travel that way to our next destination.
The next thing I made was fruit leather. I was canning some jams, strawberry, I believe. I poured the froth onto an oiled cookie sheet and put it in the oven for a few hours on low. At some point I gently cut it in strips and peeled it up slowly, then turned it over so both sides were evenly dried.
I've done onions and peppers by dicing them and spreading them out on a cookie sheet under a pilot light on a gas oven all night. I flipped them once during the process. When I had an electric oven, I cooked them at 150 for about 3 hours. They should be brittle when done. The stronger the flavor of your onion, the more flavor the dried pieces will have. To reconstitute, ideally you will want to soak the onions in about the same amount of liquid- so 1/2 cup dried onion would soak in 1/2 a cup of liquid. Ideally it would soak for an hour or two and then you'd use it just like chopped onion. Often, I just added them to soups and stews or the liquid for pasta.
I recently did a couple pints of blueberries in the dehydrator. These were easy and delicious.
Because I don't trust my own work that well, I store dehydrated foods that I am not going to eat pretty soon in plastic bags or glass jars in my freezer. Sometimes I save the little desiccant packages that come in other foods and put them in the jar with my dehydrated foods.
There are links to other sites on dehydrating your own foods here.
There are tips on home-cooked convenience food here.
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4 Responses to “Dehydrating Foods”
May 27th, 2011 at 12:40 pm
I am bookmarking this! Love it. So glad you posted this here as I also subscribe to the Common Room but can’t leave comments there for some reason…
May 27th, 2011 at 10:53 pm
Dehydrating Beans,LOL,that’s a Gas LOL.
Really, I would love to know more, how do you use them or eat them ?
May 28th, 2011 at 8:53 am
The first of the two links at the bottom of the post has more information on what I did with the dehydrated beans.
Keep in mind, this was for a camping trip,not every day use.
I wonder if once dehydrated, you could blend them a powder and then make instant refried beans?
May 28th, 2011 at 10:00 am
I bet it would work. I tried to make instant refried beans by milling the uncooked beans. It seemed to work but they had an unpleasant raw bean taste to them. Dehydrated would probably take care of that.
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