Well, after running across quite a few YouTube videos on dehydrating food, I decided to give my dehydrator a try.
I will apologize up front because I didn't take many pictures because I was just too excited about trying this out a few weeks back and didn't think about sharing this with others at the time.
What I bought:
2 bags of carrots
2 bags of celery
2 bags of green onions
1 bag of garlic
2 packages of pre-sliced mushrooms
1 bag of white onions
I sliced all the vegetables down into smaller pieces. The smaller the pieces the quicker they dehydrator but keep in mind smaller pieces may fall through your dehydrator layers if you don't have liners. I didn't but I did have a few disposable cutting mats that I cut to fit my dehydrator trays. You can also line the trays with parchment paper if you have that on hand. My trays are rectangular so that makes it a bit easier to line the trays.
The carrots I sliced into rounds, the celery and green onions I chopped down to smaller pieces, and the garlic I peeled and chopped using a mini food processor. I sliced half of the onions into rings, the other half I diced up and froze. The mushrooms were pre-sliced so those I only had to give a quick wash.
My dehydrator has 10 trays in it and I bought it roughly two or three years ago online, I believe from Walmart. I originally bought it to make jerky but hadn't ventured into anything else besides that up until now so I was curious how this would turn out. Despite having quite a bit of room, I still had to run the vegetables in batches.
The thing that is nice about this is that dehydrating the vegetables certainly adds to the shelf life of the vegetables but it also decreases the amount of room you need to store them.
Here is one of the bags of green onions dehydrated, both the jar and the bag are sitting on top of my dehydrator:
I was able to fit one full bag in that small 8 ounce canning jar by the time it was completely dehydrated.
Here are the carrots:
Both bags fit into this one recycled jar (I think it was a pasta sauce jar), though I have used some of the carrots so its not as full as it was originally.
The half of the onions that I sliced into rings fit nicely into this recycled container:
The mushrooms and garlic I did a bit differently.
I was intrigued by the thought of being able to make my own seasoning blends. Anyone who knows me knows how much I prefer to make my own items when I can to eliminate ingredients that are impossible to pronounce in my life.
Here are the mushrooms when they came out of the dehydrator, surprisingly I thought to take this picture:
Mushrooms seemed to shrink up the most because of their moisture content, but I was thrilled. After a run through my coffee grinder, I had a nice mushroom powder I can now add to my own seasoning blends, soups, stews, or any dish I want a little mushroom flavor without big pieces of mushrooms.
I bought 2 16-ounce packages of mushrooms, they were on sale, and was able to fit them both in this one jar once they were ground up.
The garlic I dehydrated as well, using the disposable cutting mats, and half of them I ground up the same way in the coffee grinder and the other half I jarred to use as they were.
I have also ventured out since to dehydrate canned green beans into yummy green bean chips of a sort and canned tomatoes which make yummy croutons on a salad.
The one down side to this is that it does take time. A lot of time. The mushrooms seemed to take the longest time and had to dehydrate about a full day, but overall I am very happy with the results.
What have you dehydrated lately?
Danielle
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