An Easy Way to Dehydrate Fruits and Vegetables

Yesterday we had the opportunity to pick up some packages of frozen corn.  The price was right so we bought 36 packages.  Now what do you do with all this frozen food, there is not enough room in our freezer to fit it all in.  We just got our nine tray Excalibur Dehydrator out and dehydrate them. All the corn that wouldn’t fit in the freezer went right into the dehydrator.  We set it to 125 degrees and by morning, we will have a nice batch of dehydrated corn.

This is something we have been doing for some time.  A friend in Wyoming has been doing it for years and has vegetables that he dehydrated in this manner that are going on ten years old.  My wife is always running our dehydrator.  Just the other day she was drying mangos.  She just cuts them up into slices and spreads them out on the shelves.  A few hours later, she has nice dried fruit.

She packs the dried food in mason jars and seals them with the vacuum attachment on her Food Saver.  We have had some stored for several years now and have not had anything go bad.  This is a good way to preserve the excess from your garden.   Be sure that the finished product is dried until all the moisture is gone.  It should be brittle and break, if it bends it needs to be dried some more.

If you watch the sales, you will find many good buys on frozen vegetables and fruit at this time of year.  The frozen foods are easy to dehydrate since they are already cleaned and peeled.  This method not only saves you money, but also time that you can spend in other productive ways.  Just because you can buy the frozen foods is not an excuse not to have a garden you want to use both methods.  You still need the education you get by gardening.

Howard