We haven’t talked much about dehydration this season, so let’s dig into it! While dehydration isn’t our most used preservation technique, it’s definitely in the mix for methods we use to preserve foods, ingredients and flowers for the long term. Our dehydrator runs for a lot of hours every season!
We’ll be the first to tell you, we aren’t “preppers,” but we are more prepared than most. That said, dehydration of foods is often associated with this world. Rightfully so, it offers extremely long term preservation of foods and shelf stable results. The resulting preserved foods are easy to keep and can last for an exceptional amount of time. What’s not to like?
Well, a lot, actually. Dehydrated foods aren’t intuitive to use by most people. They often require “rehydration” (or adding water back in) and this process can significantly alter the texture and “experience” of the food. As for us, when we’ve preserved primary ingredients this way, we often ignore it and buy “fresh” anyway since that’s what we prefer. So, that’s why it’s not a “go to” preservation technique for us.
But, dehydration does offer some useful preservation results when used strategically!
We do a lot of different projects with our dehydrator each season. What you’re seeing here are dehydrated celery leaves, which we intend to turn into both a celery spice and a home made celery salt. But, you can also do things like sun dried tomatoes, dried peppers for pepper powders and even dried lemons that can be used to make shelf-stable lemonade mixes. There’s a zillion ways to use a dehydrator, but we try to be “smart” with it and make things we’ll enjoy and want to use.
Another thing we use our dehydrator for is when we’re making dyes from our dye garden, we’ll usually dehydrate foods and flowers that we intend to turn into a dye. You can use a lot of colorful foods and flowers to create dyes. This post isn’t intended to be a be-all resource for this, but we will tell you that our dehydrator plays a vital role in this effort. These dyes can be used for painting, illustration, dying yarns and fabrics or various other projects we might plan.
Sometimes we don’t even use the dehydrator, preferring to just air dry our stuff. You see us do this with herbs, since it helps with achieving maximum flavor and quality from our dried products.
One of the key skills you need to learn with dehydration is how to determine “when is it done?” Obviously the goal is “when there’s no more water left,” but that’s a very vague and unmeasurable endpoint that is difficult for people to understand, especially when you’re first picking up dehydration. So, we’ll share a useful thing we very often do!
We store our dried goods in glass, trying to go for an “air tight” seal. Often times, our canning jars and used lids come to the rescue here. Not only is this a preferred storage technique for dehydrated foods, it also gives us a very good measurement for assessing the status of our dehydrated foods!
The beneficial side effect of this is that if there’s any moisture left, it’ll cause water droplets (i.e. humidity) to sort of “bead up” on the glass. If you see this, it’s a certain sign you haven’t performed sufficient dehydration and you need to dehydrate more. If you don’t dehydrate to fully dried, it’s likely your foods will spoil prematurely.
We do find dehydration to be a very useful preservation technique, our dehydrator runs for days and days every year! But, we do encourage the use of dehydration to be focused on creating things you will want to use. If you don’t know how to cook dehydrated chili, or whatever it is, don’t make it! But, there’s lots of ways to use a dehydrator to make useful, helpful things with your food and flowers!
