I have been planning on starting a thread about the dehydrator we bought and how we have been using it. I will try to start the thread tonight or the next day or so.
We bought the nine tray
Excalipur. If you clicked into the special for hunters they gave you a 10 year extended warranty, a free shipping, dehydration guide, and few more things. Looks like the special expired at the end of last month. The special was a better price you could get on Amazon or anywhere else. The price was about $300 but I also bought another book on Amazon and we just bought some nonstick trays from Amazon as well. I have not tried they tray from Amazon but they were 9 for $25ish vs $80-90 from Excalibur! The ones from Amazon appear to be the same material minus the company's name.
We have been drying fruit primarily but I have done some jerky which was very good. Fruit leather aka roll ups are pretty easy. Put the fruit in a food processor, whiz the heck out of it, pour on rack, smooth out, and dry. Since we do not have the non stick trays we have been wrapping plastic wrap on the racks. This works but the leather sticks to the plastic wrap, you can have some wastage and it can take time to peel off. A better idea, besides the non stick trays, would be to try parchment paper whose width fits the trays.
How long does the food last? I honestly don't know since we eat it up pretty danged quickly. I do have some Blueberry fruit leather on my desk that is about four weeks old and is just fine. I made some flax seed crackers that I did not dry enough and those danged things were growing a new life form after a week!
Dried Apples that are as old as the leathers are just fine. For real long term storage I would think one would dry to below 20%, seal in a vacuum sealer, store in a Mylar bag with O2 and moisture eaters in a five gallon bucket.
We bought the dehydrator to make dried fruit and jerky. We plan to plant Blueberry bushes and Apple trees in the fall. The dehydrator can process A LOT of food pretty easily. We just did 16 pints of Blueberries last weekend at two pints on eight trays. Part of the leaning curve is figuring out how much food you can process at one time which means how much can you get on a tray. With Blueberries, I think we can get 2.5-3 pints per tray or 22-27 pints! Cored and slice Apples are about two per tray. It looks like any Apple sized fruit works out to two per tray. We have done Mangoes at two per tray and huge Papaya's take up one rack for one fruit. I think Apple leathers will work out to about 2.5-3 per tray as well. Pineapples are one per tray.
I have been making crackers out of Flax seed, Sesame seed, Almonds, rice flour and sunflower seeds. Pretty simple stuff.
The Excalipur uses at most 600 watts. The wetter fruits like pineapples take 8-12 hours to dry depending on humidity and the wetness of the fruit. We put the dehydrator on the porch so that the noise, heat and humidity is not added to the house. It is not that noisy if you had it in a utility room. In the winter we might run it in the house since then we would want the heat and humidity. :laughing: I doubt the Excaliper uses 600 watts when it is 90 degrees out side and it is running at 135, but worse case, that is only 6,000 watts over 10 hours or 6 KWH. We pay ten cents a KWH so we might be paying 60 cents to dry two apples and 16 pints of Blueberries or four Apples, four Mangoes, two Pineapples, a Papaya, and four pints of Blueberries. 2.5 pounds of London Broil took up 2-3 trays when I made jerky.
We eat quite a bit of dried fruit and that stuff is expensive. I figure in one month we have saved about $100. We DO eat quite a bit of dried fruit! :laughing:
Let me repeat that it looks like Excalipur runs specials on various pages on their site. The specials might not be real obvious so it pays to click.
I will start up the dehydrator thread soon.
On Edit: Good gracious I am a wordy blankety blank. :laughing: I was trying to keep this short....
Later,
Dan
