Home Canning Options

[dmccarty]

Professional dehydrators have some advantages, it's true, but depending on your oven, you may be able to do near as good a job with what you already have in your house. The question is how low a temperature your oven goes to. My old oven would go down to 150. I moved, and my current oven goes down to 135. It's got convection to boot, so there's moving air, which speeds things along. When I want to dehydrate, I put the stuff on sheet pans (if it's loose material like dried herbs) or on a cooling rack set in a sheet pan (if it's bigger stuff like sliced tomatoes or apples) and put it in the oven on the lowest temperature. It dehydrates just fine, and I didn't have to spend a bunch of money on a dehydrator. It is worth thinking, however, whether I'm spending more in electricity to heat up that big oven, even just to 135. I dunno.

Another approach I'm familiar with uses fans and HVAC filters (clean ones, please). You get a big box fan and several filter and use bungee cords to strap the filters to the face of the fan. You put the food to be dried in between the filters and then set the fan on some blocks or something, facing upwards, so it's blowing air through the filters and past the food. Even though there is no heat, the moving air dries stuff out really quickly. This works best for stuff like jerky, which loses its moisture relatively easily. If you were going to do herbs this way, you would want to do them in bunches, still on the branch/stalk, since they would just fall all over the place if the herb was loose.

I need to check out Cabela's but the Excaliber brand is what we are thinking of buying.

I have tried the stove route and it did not work well. Not sure why. The problem with the stove is the heat generated at this time of year. It costs some real money to run that stove. The unit we are looking at uses 600 watts which I assume is worst case depending on the temperature being uses. If we ran the unit for 10 hours that is 6KWH which is 60 cents at our power pricing. Using the stove would be much more money AND we would have to run the AC to cook down what the oven heated up. If it was winter time I would not care so much. :laughing: Today, with high humidity and 96 I care.

Good Eats did a dehydrator like you describe. In my reading someone mentioned drying herbs in the microwave. Something about the microwave driving off the water but leaving the oils. I will have to dry that some day.

Later,
Dan

 

[forgeblast]

I was thinking about kraut, (we have a kraut soup every christmas eve) and so I was looking around at crocks. The shipping on them is expensive but....ace hardware carrys them and they will free ship them to a store of your choice. Search results for "crock" at Ace Hardware shows the sizes from what I have read the 2 gallon would be good for us (3 people). The only problem is there is no lid. But there is a way around that, you can use an oven bag (the clear ones you cook turkeys in) and fill it 1/4 of the way with brin water. It will push the kraut down and seal it like its supposed to and then put a towel over the top. I may get one if we have a good cabbage crop this year. Anyone ever use red cabbage for it or only the green?