To make the roll ups I follow the directions from dehydrate2store on you tube..I made a lovely strawberry roll up last night.she adds a little corn syrup...
Thanks! I will check that out. I like that website. It’s where I learned to dehydrate potatoes.
I am new to dehydrating too. I bought an inexpensive one at the Salvation Army. Then a couple of months ago I found an excalibur 9 tray with the door missing for $14.95. The door costs $30; but still waaaaaayyy cheaper than a new one.
Does anyone know how to make tomato powder?
What a score!! I'm jealous because we paid near full price for ours.
For tomato powder we just slice, dehydrate and then run the dried tomatoes through a coffee grinder for powder. If I want it to be more like flakes and a few medium sized pieces I use the Ninja blender.
How do you keep things from sticking to it?
We also have a cheap round one. I have not figured out a good way to keep the food from sticking. I've used the herb tray because you can bend it and get the food off of it easier than the hard spoke tray. The bad thing about that is that it takes longer to dry. I've used cheese cloth. It worked great for the frozen mixed veggies, until I tossed it in the washer and drier. It shriveled, knotted & I had to throw it out. I’ve read that you can use old panty hose. You just slide the tray in the leg hole. I never wear panty hose so I’ve never tried it.
I bought a food dehydrator a few months ago and I dried a lot of apples, but being frugal I found it used too much power. I wouldn't mind having a solar powered one. How long does it take you to dry apples on your dehydrators? It takes about 7 hours on mine, and I think that is too long.
Unfortunately that sounds about right. I’m on time of day electric so I do most of my dehydrating on the weekends and during the night when my electricity is 1/3 the price. My 9 tray Excalibur costs 2.7 cents/hour during non-peak rate and @9 cents/ hour during peak rate. The round dehydrator costs 3.2 cents/hour non-peak and @.10/hour during peak. I found that the round one takes @2-4 hours longer to dry than the Excalibur. Plus the 9 Tray Excalibur dries roughly twice as much as 5 round trays.
With that being said 10 hours of drying time will cost me $0.27 - 1.00 depending which machine I use and the time of day I dry the goods. IMHO $1 to preserve food & put it on my pantry shelf indefinitely is less than I would pay to keep it frozen in the freezer and to risk freezer burn. Plus dehydrating destroys the least amount of nutrition, 2-5% freezing is in the middle (30-50% is destroyed if I remember correctly) and canning destroys @80% of the nutrition. Not to say that I don't use other methods of preservation but I take more than just cost into consideration. Sometimes my laziness factor is really high and it wins over cost, nutrition or common sense.
