Let’s chat about another preservation technique. Dehydration may not be everyone’s favorite preservation method, but it’s certainly valuable for a lot of different products!
When we first got into dehydration, decades ago, it seemed like the ideal preservation method for almost everything. Shelf stable, few food safety concerns and all you had to do was make sure all the water was gone. Well, that stood true until we started using those dehydrated things. We just didn’t care for the rehydration process and significant texture change that comes from dehydrated foods.
That said, our dehydrator definitely gets a workout every single season! We’ve learned to use the method strategically, crafting very specific products from very specific produce. As we occasionally say, we’re not preppers trying to build up a decade of food supplies here!
An example of such a use is drying our cayenne peppers. We find cayenne pepper power extremely versatile in the kitchen. It’s got a fair bit of heat, so it doesn’t take much. It’s also a rather neutral tasting pepper, meaning it’s really just there for heat and we don’t get a strong “pepper like” taste when using it.
There’s a ton of things you can dehydrate and turn into useful powders or dried products. For example, onions can be made into onion powder, chips or salts. Garlic can be made into garlic powder, chips or salt. Tomato powder is also useful, but then there’s “sun dried” tomatoes, too. That’s just the beginning, too.
One of the helpful things, especially up north, is you can dehydrate across multiple sessions. Often, our desired produce isn’t ready “all at once,” so we’ll set up multiple sessions over the season to bulk up our final product. We often temporarily store the dried form, then process it it into a final form once we have enough.
We find it helpful to use “real things” we’d buy as our starting point for dehydration. We’re not using it to create dehydrated meals, aside from an occasional backpacking meals we might craft up. But, if it’s something that comes in “dried form,” the dehydrator might be a useful tool to get there.
When you use the dehydrator strategically like this, it can be a highly valuable tool to have in the garden toolkit. We like that we can kick off a preservation and just check on it hours later. Sometimes we’ll even start a dehydration late at night, then finish it up in the morning.
We’ve been using the same Nesco dehydrator for decades now. We’ve got it kitted out fairly well with four trays, liquid trays and beef jerky/fruit leather trays. Every once in awhile we think about an upgrade to something larger or more powerful, but this thing’s been a workhorse and there’s no sense in fixing what’s not broken.
