Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

When we first got our dehydrator , apples were one of the first things we tried drying.  Apple chips are probably my favorite dried fruit.  You can easily dry them to the point of crispness, and they are always nice and sweet.  The only problem--buying apples in bulk has gotten more expensive over the last year or so.  I waited impatiently last fall for the prices to drop below a dollar a pound so we could bring home a big bag and get to drying, but apparently the apple crop took a big hit from the drought last year.  This year that is not the case, unfortunately the costs of everything keeps rising and apples have not really returned to their pre-drought prices.  Thankfully, Costco came through.  The 10 pound bags were finally under 10 bucks again. Their 10 pound bags are full of GIANT Red Delicious apples--which make a nice sweet chip. We started by laying out a colored cutting board.  If you're cutting a bunch of apples and you accide...

I made a quick stop at the local grocery store the other day and found that they were selling a cartload full of bags of ripe bananas for 99 cents (each bag had about a dozen bananas in it).  These weren't the make banana bread with me now or I'll go all gushy bananas either, they were the eat me today because I am ripe bananas.  So I bought a big bag of ripe bananas because I knew that we could dry them. We used a banana slicer to cut our bananas. It is quick and provides a uniform thickness.  We have also used a mandoline to cut bananas, but they are slippery and sticky, the banana slicer is quicker and less of the banana gets smashed to bits in the process. I laid out the slices in our dehydrator and set it to the fruit and vegetable setting (135 degrees) and let it go. It's been pretty hot and humid here, so even with the AC running, these took a bit longer than usual to dry. They usually take 12-16 hours, but this time they took 24 hours to dry....

Cherries were on sale last week.  $1.98 a pound.  That's about as cheap as they get around here.  My husband loves cherries and loves dried fruit.  So we gave dehydrating cherries our first try.  We bought two big bags of cherries, rinsed them off, and pulled their stems.  Then we set about pitting them.  If you want to stay sane, you'd better use a Cherry Pitter , but if you're a glutton for punishment, you could slice them in half and pry the pit out of every little cherry.  Once they are pitted, we sliced them in half and set them on the dehydrating trays.  I was surprised that we used both bags to fill our  dehydrator . I was also surprised that it took so long for them to dry.  We left the dehydrator running for about 30 hours on the fruit setting (135 degrees).  Some of the cherries were still a bit tacky, but the smaller ones were dry to the touch.  They come out looking almost like big raisins, but not quite a...

Strawberries are in season, so time to buy in bulk and dehydrate!  We bought a 4lb box of strawberries at Costco and used about half to fill up our dehydrator . I setup my work station with a small knife for hulling, a cutting board to work on, a colander for washing, and a strawberry slicer . I rinsed the berries and cut off the stems and plopped them in our strawberry slicer.  It made quick work of the job.  I know it's a bit of a unitasker , but I picked it up at TJ Maxx for even less than they sell it for at amazon, and it sure speeds things up.  You could always use a mandolin or even just cut them by hand (but try to keep them relatively uniform in width). Place the strawberry slices close together (as seen in the fresh photo above) but not so close that they are touching.  The air needs to be able to circulate, but they can be close together because (as you can see in the dried photo below) they shrink as they dry. We set ours to...

My husband received a food dehydrator from his mother for Christmas last year.  In the past year we've dehydrated lots of fruits and some meat for Jerky.  And during those experiments, most of what we dried turned out great.  Of course, it's always trial and error when cooking, and that's especially true of dehydrating because of all of the factors that keep recipe books from having definitive times, widths to cut things, and even temperatures to set your dehydrator at.  Much of these estimations and ranges have to do with your dehydrator--they don't all have the same motors or settings.  Air temperature and humidity also play a part, and so do variations in the food you are drying (ex: different types of apples grown in different climates harvested at different times are going to have different water content).  That being said, I hope I can share a few of the things we've learned about dehydrating by showing some of the things we have been succe...