All dried up: Adventures in food dehydration

—by Anne Holzman

A friend with a bumper crop of tiny, imperfect pears got me started last summer. They’d be perfect for drying,

I said, then persuaded my husband to set up the food dryer we hadn’t used in years.

The dried pears were treats. I decided this summer I’d get an earlier start. As with most projects, I began by hitting the books. Our copy of Deanna DeLong’s How to Dry Foods is even older than our dehydrator. It has served me well all summer, with handy charts and concise text.

At first there seemed to be too many steps — cleaning, chopping, blanching, blending, taping plastic sheets onto the food dryer. But as with so many food projects, there’s enough pleasure in the sensory experience to keep me going. (Also, my husband does the dishes, which really helps.) It’s surprisingly easy to do with kids around, too, because there’s no hot grease and not even much reason to turn on the stove. I can break up a lot of fights while the veggies sit on their trays for hours on end.

And the kids eat the results. I had a blueberry hater eating dried blueberries, and a kid who bites every peach once and declares it “mushy” ripping peach leather out of my hand. I thought food drying was all about preservation, but it’s preparation too; and even with some nutritional loss, the kids try new flavors and I claim victory before the fruit’s even gone out of season.

I borrowed Mary T. Bell’s Food Drying with an Attitude and liked it so much, I bought a copy. A Lanesboro local, Bell has written several books about food drying, and her peppy prose turns a chore into an adventure. For a more sober approach, I also dabbled in The Dehydrator Bible, by Jennifer MacKenzie, Jay Nutt, and Don Mercer. Both books offer tips and refinements worth trying, but it’s the plain old how-to book that has acquired the smudges and dog-ears of a season’s honorable service in the kitchen.

Joey Holzman, 8, watches berries dry.

Nevertheless, I’ve got to hand it to Bell. She’s got one of my kids hooked on kale. Kale!

There is also, of course, a great deal of information online, although the results from search terms “dry,” “food,” and “dehydrate” require some patience to sort through. I like the University of Georgia’s National Center for Home Food Preservation.

HPC member Anita Doyle gave me a backyard tour midway through all this experimentation. She’s the proud builder and operator of a solar food dryer, which sounds very grand but amounts to plastic, cardboard, and a couple of trays that look like refugees from a toaster oven. She was drying some berries in her backyard and said the rig is mainly good for herbs, but at least squirrels haven’t come after the berries. She uses electricity for most of her fruits and vegetables. (For directions to build your own solar deydrator, go to http://www.jrwhipple.com/sr/soldehydrate.html.)

My two favorite projects:

Fruit leather

Buy fruit in season; check your favorite chart for recommendations about peeling, blanching, straining, and other preparations. I asked HPC’s produce manager, Matt Hass, for a deal on some past-perfect fruit and used whatever he had. You don’t need a lot; two apricots and two pears made a pretty good blender load and a sheet of leather roughly a foot long by half a foot wide. (My dryer is a big box; for the small, circular countertop ones, you could do even less and it wouldn’t look lost on the tray.) It takes some practice to get the slurry evenly poured, and please don’t try to turn it over when it’s not quite dry! Plastic wrap taped to the dryer trays worked fine, but I don’t care for all that plastic, so we plan to invest in some better leather trays for next summer. The leather has made a great take-along snack on summer outings. What we haven’t eaten already, I’m storing in the fridge or freezer in glass and plastic containers.

Vegetable soup mix

Chop up whatever vegetables you like, which is the best thing about making this yourself — I have a hard time digesting onions, which rules out most soup mixes for me. Working from garden and CSA piles, I chose carrots, bell peppers, and green beans, plus a selection of herbs. (Potatoes were knocked off the list after Anita, she of the solar dryer, told me they weren’t worth the trouble.)

I prepared and dried the vegetables separately, one crop per tray, and I was surprised at how little time it took — a little over half an hour to clean, chop, blanch, and arrange carrots, herbs, and pepper, plus a quarter-hour the day before to chop, blanch, and pre-freeze the beans. I’ll store them all together and have them ready to toss into soup in the middle of winter. If I can wait that long.

[Anne Holzman is a freelance writer and at-home mother of three children and one food dehydrator.]