Adventures in Dehydrating

A little over a week ago, we bought a dehydrator. Dehydrating is new to me, but something I've wanted to try for a while. It's a fantastic way to preserve food, which makes a nice addition to what we already can and freeze. Also, I love some dried fruit. I find it much easier to eat dried apples than a whole apple while working at my desk.

I started with some pears and apples. We used fantastic organic pears and apples, and left the skin on (just cut out the cores). We sliced them on our mandolin, abour 3/8" thick.

Have I mentioned I love our mandolin?

The celery was our first vegetable. What you see in that jar above is one bunch of celery. Again, sliced on the mandolin after a good washing, no blanching required. We left the celery on overnight at 125 and it was perfect in the morning.  Another vegetable we did this week was carrots. Those I steamed for 5 - 6 minutes after slicing them on the mandolin. Left them overnight but found they needed a bit of extra time the following day.

Finally, tomatoes! The dried tomatoes have a great taste, I can't wait to cook with them. Roma tomatoes work really well. We probably sliced ours slightly too thick, they took longer than expected. But we did slice them in a manner that they sat skin side down, which really helped to keep the tomato intact and from sticking to the trays.

A before and after:

My week's worth of dehydrated goodies. 

I'm trying my hand at some date bars with seeds and nuts tonight. At the very least I have some tasty nutty/seedy goo to eat on.... something. But if these work out, expect another update soon.