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What do you dehydrate? The difference in storage size is amazing to me!
I got the Excalibur 9-tray unit. I LOVE it!
My first effort was carrots. I chopped, sliced and diced, not sure what would work best, so made at least one tray of each different cut. With 9 trays, I chopped up almost 10 lbs of carrots. My hand hurt. Skyowl bought me a food processor for future efforts.
Followed their instructions and dried my carrots. I thought I had them right, pulling out the smaller chunks at the recommended time, others still felt "squishy" so I dried them for a few more hours. Ended up with all in a container that I set aside.
Used my new food processor to slice up 4 pounds of big onions. Everything I've read says don't dry onions, chili peppers, garlic, or ginger with anything else, or everything will smell/taste just like the onions, peppers, etc.
Put my dried onions into a rubbermaid container.
And waited.
Checked my carrots a couple of weeks later - there were spots of mold on some of them. *sigh*. Threw the lot of them away and bought another 10 pounds of fresh carrots. They are running about 1.50 a 5 lb bag right now, so learning on the cheap!
I sought advice both here (thanks Lostinoz :)) and online. All agreed that they must simply be DRY and consistently sized.
Got Skyowl to use the meat slicer for the next batch.
Dried them for about 4 hours, rotated the trays 180 degrees, turned them down to the lowest heat setting and went to bed.
The next morning, they were curly wonderfulness!
We figured that we ended up with a little over 7 pounds on the trays. When we weighed the output, we had just under 12 oz. Woot!
The onions are still holding, so believe I got lucky on those - the first try.
Figure I'll get whatever fruit or vegetable is on sale on Friday afternoon and dry a couple of batches each weekend. Should be able to lay in a nice supply, that way.
I got the Excalibur 9-tray unit. I LOVE it!
My first effort was carrots. I chopped, sliced and diced, not sure what would work best, so made at least one tray of each different cut. With 9 trays, I chopped up almost 10 lbs of carrots. My hand hurt. Skyowl bought me a food processor for future efforts.
Followed their instructions and dried my carrots. I thought I had them right, pulling out the smaller chunks at the recommended time, others still felt "squishy" so I dried them for a few more hours. Ended up with all in a container that I set aside.
Used my new food processor to slice up 4 pounds of big onions. Everything I've read says don't dry onions, chili peppers, garlic, or ginger with anything else, or everything will smell/taste just like the onions, peppers, etc.
Put my dried onions into a rubbermaid container.
And waited.
Checked my carrots a couple of weeks later - there were spots of mold on some of them. *sigh*. Threw the lot of them away and bought another 10 pounds of fresh carrots. They are running about 1.50 a 5 lb bag right now, so learning on the cheap!
I sought advice both here (thanks Lostinoz :)) and online. All agreed that they must simply be DRY and consistently sized.
Got Skyowl to use the meat slicer for the next batch.
Dried them for about 4 hours, rotated the trays 180 degrees, turned them down to the lowest heat setting and went to bed.
The next morning, they were curly wonderfulness!
We figured that we ended up with a little over 7 pounds on the trays. When we weighed the output, we had just under 12 oz. Woot!
The onions are still holding, so believe I got lucky on those - the first try.
Figure I'll get whatever fruit or vegetable is on sale on Friday afternoon and dry a couple of batches each weekend. Should be able to lay in a nice supply, that way.
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