Food Drier – First Batches Experience

Having spent about 10 days away from garden and a Real Kitchen ™, I’ve been a bit “domestic” the last couple of days. Catching things up on watering in the garden. Checking food inventory, etc.

Along the way, saw that I still had 1/2 of a large pumpkin, “Cinderella” type I think, in the freezer from last Halloween. I’d canned 1/2 and ran out of jars so just froze the rest. Well, 1/2 a pumpkin, even if in large 1/4 moon slices, takes up a lot of valuable freezer space. On the Tax Run to California, I also picked up my food drier. Bought a decade or two ago, but still “new in box”…

Well, one thought leads to another and I decided now would be a good time to give it a try. Short form: It works great. The space reduction for vegetables is dramatic.

Longer form:

I started 2 days ago with some carrots. We had a big bag in the fridge and they did not get any younger while I was gone. Nor, it seems, does anyone else in the house cook with raw carrots… So I picked out about 1/2 dozen, scraped the skin off with the back of a knife, removed about 1/4 inch of each end, and then sliced into about 1/4 inch (6 mm or so) thick slices. Vegetables get a 3 to 5 minute blanch in boiling water then in ice water to stop the cooking. Arranged on a couple of trays (it is a 4 tray NESCO “American Harvest” drier & jerky maker) and let run at about 135 F for 6 to 9 hours (depending on vegetable in question, wetness, and thickness of cut… also your humidity).

About 6 or 7 hours later, I had about a cup of shriveled up little carrot bits. Chewing on one, it seemed to taste fine. Into a jar and stored in a “cool dry place”. someday to be added to some soup or stew.

Then the next day at the store, bags of fresh green beans were on sale for something like $1.69. I got two. One for eating as fresh green beans. The other? Ends bobbed, cut in half, and into the blanch, cool, dry process. I now have about a 12 oz jar of dried green beans too.

Which brought me to the pumpkin. I’d set it out to defrost while I did the beans. Opening the zip lock bags it was stored in; a LOT of liquid came out. Seems that pumpkin is mostly water and freezing punctures the cells and lets a lot of it out…

It was originally cut into wedges along the lines of longitude. About a dozen slices I think. These were now each sliced into slices along the latitudes. Each cut giving a slice about 1/4 inch, but some closer to 1/8 and some nearly 1/2 inch. It seems frozen then thawed pumpkin is somewhat mushy and floppy… It would be easier with fresh not frozen pumpkin. I have a ‘blue’ one on the counter from last October that will be dried in a couple of days… Yes, it has kept well for a good 1/2 year now.

Again the blanch (but in a much bigger pot) and cool in ice water bath. Onto the trays. I did one batch of 2 trays last night. The pumpkin shrinks dramatically into very thin wafers. Some thicker cuts took nearly 12 hours to dry completely. Thinner bits were done at about 7 hours.

Today was a kind of mini-marathon of the rest of the pumpkin. I now have a completely full dryer load running. I’ve also recovered a very nice chunk of the freezer space. About 11 PM I’ll be putting the dry bits in a quart jar.

Now I just need to figure out how to use it in cooking something I want to eat ;-)

I’m not real sure this is the best pumpkin for eating. It was sold for decoration. But it has been a great pumpkin for learning the dryer.

Observations

As with most food preservation, the prepping of the food is the most work and time. Peeling, cutting, heating, cooling, etc. The actual time and work to use the drier (or a canner) is small compared to all the rest.

It is a very easy device to use. Lay stuff on the tray, turn it on, come back many hours later.

The volume taken up by the stored food is dramatically reduced. For anyone with space issues looking to store some prep food, dry or freeze dried is your friend.

Now that I’ve actually used it, I’ll be using it a lot more. We regularly have too many carrots, or celery that’s not going to be used up before it goes bad. Canning it takes jars, washing them, and is a bit of a project. Just slicing some vegetable and laying it on a tray is trivial to do. There’s going to be less waste from the fridge and more jars of dried stuff.

It also ought to make things like soups and stews easier to make as all the cutting and peeling is already done. Hopefully the flavor of a soup made with dried vegetables (for at least some of them) will still be fine. I’ll find out.

In theory, I can also make things like dried banana chips and other fruits. This will become valuable when my banana trees start to give me way too many bananas! Then there’s jerky. I’ll do that after I’ve got vegetables and fruits mastered. Reading the booklet that came with it, looks like cut meat thin, soak in a “cure” and spices, put on the rack on high (190F) and come back later… Details TBD.

Overall, I’m happy with it. The sound is a soft whirring, about like a fan running in another room. I’ve not had to clean it yet so we’ll see how hard that is. (The carrots and beans left nothing to clean, only the pumpkin is drippy / sloppy…)

If anyone else has used a food drier and has recommended recipes for using dried vegetables and fruits, feel free to offer advice. I’m a novice with these ingredients. I’ve used freeze dried from cans, but that is a different product that re-hydrates more like the original material.

I also don’t know how well / how long a jar of this stuff keeps on a shelf. For now, I’m keeping a tight lid on them and putting them in the fridge. A couple of jars in the fridge is nearly no space compared to what they replaced.

So with that, back to all the political Clown Show our world has become…

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