Fruits can be dried with a food dehydrator.
With a food dehydrator, you can dry fruits, vegetables and meats for preservation. Make your own jerky, fruit leather or dried soup mix. Dried foods take up less storage space than canned goods and, once dried, don't require electricity to stay preserved the way frozen foods do. Food dehydrators produce more even, predictable results than sun-drying food outdoors or drying it in a home oven. Does this Spark an idea?
Construction
Look for lightweight metal or plastic construction. Wooden dehydrators carry more risk of catching on fire and are heavier. Since a dehydrator isn't the kind of appliance you use every day, you'll want a unit that's easy to move in and out of the cabinet or shelf where you're storing it when not in use. Dehydrators may be round or rectangular; either shape works fine. An electric dehydrator should have trays for drying food, a fan to circulate air and a thermostat for adjusting the drying temperature. A timer allows you to fill the unit, turn it on and forget it, making it convenient to dry food overnight.
Capacity
Dehydrators contain trays on which you spread the prepared food to dry. Most home units contain three to five trays. Buy a dehydrator that will accommodate the quantity of food you're most likely to dry at one time. Figure 1 lb. of prepared food for every square foot of space in your dehydrator. To dry a half-bushel of produce, you'll need about 12 square feet of dehydrator space.
Operating Costs
The higher the wattage of your dehydrator, the more it will cost to operate. However, a lower-wattage dehydrator may take longer to dry food, so you'll end up spending as much or more. If you dry large quantities of food, a higher-wattage dehydrator may be a better deal. To figure the cost of operating a dehydrator, take the wattage of the oven, divide by 1,000, then multiply the total by the numbers of hours used. Multiply this amount by your local cost per 1,000 kilowatt hours.
Food Preparation
Wash all vegetables and handle them with clean hands and utensils to prevent introducing harmful bacteria to the food. When making meat jerky, the USDA recommends that you first heat poultry to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit and meat to 160 degrees Fahrenheit before dehydrating. This will kill harmful bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella. Don't overload the dehydrator, allowing space for air to circulate around the food. Cut food into uniform thicknesses, so all food in the tray will dry at the same rate.
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