After price-watching dehydrator machines for the past year and a half, this summer it finally paid off. An electric dehydrator went on sale for a 70% discount - the 9-rack model briefly sold for less than a 4-rack model. Perfect. I snapped it up.
Dehydrating: An Efficient, Passive Way To Store Food
Since reading Ben Falk's book "The Resilient Farm And Homestead", I love his section on food processing, and on storing calories and nutrition for the future. "Producing food in a garden is often easier than effectively storing all of that food for later". He discusses the usefulness of storing food longer, and the importance of using your time and energy efficiently while preserving.
Specifically: he does not like canning. "Harvest time is a time to be outdoors. Stunningly beautiful days with gratitude, urgency, and abundance all rolled into a couple of intense months. Not a time to be slaving away over a stove".
"Harvest time is a time to be outdoors. Stunningly beautiful days with gratitude, urgency, and abundance all rolled into a couple of intense months. Not a time to be slaving away over a stove". — Ben Falk
I strongly agree. I used to help my grandmother with canning when I was young, and it was a fun bonding activity. But Falk is right that canning takes so much energy, water, and time. It's fine for 'treats' like pickles, syrup, or hot sauce. But it's a lot of work to preserve food that way.
So I Tried Dehydrating
I decided to follow in Falk's footsteps and try my hand at dehydrating. It's delicious! It's also pretty low-effort, and can be done in parallel while other work is happening during the day.
While Falk is using resilient drying systems like metal grates over top of his wood-burning stove, I'm doing the non-resilient version: an electric machine with a fan, mostly made of plastic. Still, it does the job. I'm able to lay out trays of fruit and leave the machine drying them on the porch all day.
Time-wise, dehydrating fruit is fairly easy. It can take 30 to 60 minutes to wash, slice, and prep one load of fruit - depending on whether they're lovely large fruits like orchard apples, or tiny, finicky baby pears. Then the fruit takes 2 to 3 days of drying to be crisp, crunchy, and storable. But that's fine. And I am experimenting with different recipes using lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon, and all manner of tasty spices.
One plus of dehydrating on the porch - it keeps the heat outside, and avoids heating the house more during hot fall days. This also might be a good way to warm up the house or kitchen during the winter, dehydrating grocery-store fruit inside.
Fruit From The Neighbours
Autumn makes the best time for dehydrating because fruit is abundant. I was able to make a great deal with two neighbours who have fruit trees: they let me pick as much fruit as I wanted from their orchards; I dehydrated it and gave them back half. It's win-win. The small amount of fruit I take - they don't miss it and likely wouldn't have used it anyway. Meanwhile I get free fruit and another way to build positive relationships with a neighbour by giving them a gift. Fantastic deal.
The end result: Over the past few weeks I have dehydrated 15 gallons of fruit - apples, pears, nectarines. It's delicious. My family would definitely eat it faster than I can make it. And now we have many jars set up and available for snacks and nutrition all through the winter.
The dehydrator has also been useful as a fallback preservation method - to dry out grocery store fruit that *would* have gone bad. Now instead of throwing out fruit I can stick it into the dehydrator instead.
Overall: I am now a huge fan of dehydrating. Can't wait to start earlier next year.