I dehydrated hot peppers, tomatoes, bananas, pears and apples. also bell peppers for seasoning.

Anything and everything.

Tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, some spices and herbs, and some meats (by turning it into jerkey.....the only deer meat I like is venison jerkey). Some fruits are easy to dry....peaches, plums (pitted), pears, apricots, apples, and berries come to mind. Oh, and dried pitted cherries. Dried cherries are my favorite dried fruit, and I love dried kiwi and pineapple too. I usually only dry citrus fruits for natural-looking Christmas decorations to hang on a Christmas tree or garland. If you have younger children who like "fruit snacks" or "fruit roll-ups" (which are mostly artificial ingredients), you can make them dried fruit bits or fruit leathers that are 100% natural.

If you don't have space to grow fruit, you stilll can save a lot of money by buying fruit in larger quantities when it is in-season and drying it for later.

I've never dried okra, but think you could if you intended to use it later in gumbo or a soup or stew. I've never dried sweet corn or green beans. I just let beans dry naturally on the vine. Since winter squash and pumpkins will last for six months to a year in my tornado shelter or in a corner of the barn, I don't dry them either, but you could. You can dry summer squash and potatoes (sweet or Irish). You just slice them in uniform slices, or chop them into uniform pieces. Later, you can rehydrate them and cook with them.

You can even dry melons like cantaloupe, muskmelon, watermelon, etc., and it just intensifies the sweetness. I remove the rind before I dry them.

When my son was a Boy Scout, once we were planning a long camping/hiking trip to Big Ben National Park and other sites in western and southwestern Texas...and we needed a lot of dried food that would be easy for the scouts and leaders to carry in their backpacks. Instead of buying the pricey versions at an outdoor outfitter, I learned how to dry everything you can imagine. We saved tons of money and had great campfire meals made from our dehydrated foods. I also learned how to make our own protein bars (essential when you're burning tons of energy backpacking) so we didn't have to buy protein bars at the store.

About an hour ago, I was sitting here munching on a handful of dried pineapple, kiwi and strawberries.

Dawn

I have dried peaches, apples, bananas, onion, garlic, cranberries, pineapple and carrot. I have made quite a bit of beef jerky, even though I don't eat it. I've also dried parsley and mint.

My favorites are the peaches, apples and bananas.

If you slice zucchini thin and add a sprinkle of fine salt before starting the dehydration process, they are a good substitute for potato chips.

I learned the hard way to keep my dried food in the freezer. There is some kind of moth that will absolutely eat holes in plastic bags and ruin your whole bag of food. I've tried jars with the flat and band and it seems even with the band screwed down tightly, the food does draw moisture from somewhere and loses its crispness.

Once you taste 'real' dehydrated fruit, you will not want to buy the kind of dehydrated fruit they have in the stores that has lots of added sugar. I can still buy dried cranberries and apricots that don't have added sugar and I like those. I have yet to find dried pineapple and mango in any store that isn't practicaly crystalized with added sugar.

My dehydrator is an American Harvest box type with 12 slide-in shelves. There are doughnut-shaped plastic inserts to use if you want to make leather or something small that would fall through the holes. When I dry onion or garlic, and during other times when we are air-conditioning the house, I will put the dehydrator on a roll-around cart on my back porch and run it out there. I also use my dehydrator, with all the shelves removed, to make jars of yogurt. It provides a steady, uniform heat that is perfect for this. --Ilene

I have dried many of the things that Dawn and Ilene dry. Some things I have tried that I will not do again. Dill and cilantro lose too much flavor to suit me, although sage does well. I now freeze the first two. And garlic even on the porch filled the house with such a penetrating odor that our eyes watered. I now let the whole bulb dry hanging on the porch or chop and freeze some.

But I have dried okra, sweet corn and young tender green beans in the pod. I discontinued the corn, don't grow enough these days that I am keeping four families in frozen corn, but still do the okra and sometimes the beans. I like okra in gumbo and stews and dried does fine. dito beans.

I also use my dehydrator to make jerky, on full heat and yogurt on half heat. I have an Equi-flow box type with ten plastic trays. When I do jerky or fruit leather, I cover the tray with plastic film or wax paper for the first part of the drying. after the top dries good, you can remove the film when you turn these foods over. I used to dry gallons of apples until all four trees died and we had to replant.

I intend to dry cherries and peaches next year if we get as good a crop as we did this past year.

Oh so many great suggestions. Ilene, my husband is particularly excited about drying zuchinni. In addition to the fact that we both like it, he is pleased about having chip substitutes. In an effort to eat healthy, I just don't bring chips home. Yogurt is another thing I hadn't thought of. I find it increasingly difficult to find yogurt without either high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweetener.

Dawn, I has hoping someone would mention melons as a possibility, although I'm having a hard time envisioning watermelon. Maybe more as a leather?

Mulberry, I hadn't thought of okra or green beans, but they will make nice additions to winter soups and stews.

I'm a little disappointed to hear I should put my dried food in the freezer. Hubs and I are making a concerted effort to minimize energy consumption. I had hoped that drying would eliminate one of our freezers, but instead it sounds like it will make them more space efficient. Ilene, I feel your pain. We've been fighting meal moths for three straight years. Every time we think it's safe to bring food back in the house they show up again. In trying to eliminate them we have stumbled onto several unlikely breeding grounds. They were having a hey day in the stash of pecan shells in the garage and most recently I discovered them breeding in a pile of sawdust under a pull out shelf. Knock on wood, we've been moth free for three months.

Since my oven manual didn't mention the dehydrate feature, it also didn't come with any recipes. I'll have to hit up the library.

My grandmother had a "food processor" that I loved when I was a kid. The blades came on flat bottom cone and snapped into the crank handle. It was fun as a kid. As an adult I appreciate how thin the slices are. I think it will work well for the zuchinni and carrots.

Thanks for all the suggestions.
Seedmama

Seedmama,

Technically, you don't have to store your dried food in the freezer if you remove enough of the moisture but.....if you have moths and other pests, you probably ought to. Of course, as an alternative you can store it in zip-lock bags inside cookie tins or popcorn tins unless you have something that could eat through them.

Dried melons have an odd sort of texture that is hard to describe, and it varies depending on the original density of the melon and the water content of the melon. I don't dry them down quite as dry as fruit leather. If you've ever had dried mango, they kind of have similar texture to that.

Because of their high water content, melons take forever to dry. And, when you eat dried melon (and, the same holds true of all dried fruits and veggies to some extent), it will mix with the water in your digestive tract and sort of rehydrate, so you can't eat too much of it or you'll start feeling like you are going to explode.

Sometimes, melons are almost too sweet to eat once dehydrated since the dehydration process concentrates the sweetness. So, the next time you pick a melon before it is ripe, you can "save" it by dehydrating it. If even then it is not sweet, you can sprinkle on a small amount of the sweetener of your choice.

Dawn

I don't store my dried food in the freezer, but I learned the hard way that plastic--even plastic jars which are thicker than ziplocks--won't keep out meal moths. ANd I have found them in odd places too. Chicken crumbles in the barn, the dog biscuits on the porch. But only once did I have them find their way into a glass jar--but it was a 4 gallon pickle jar with a metal lid...and it had 3 gallons of dried apples in it. sob. The metal lid did not have a gasket of any kind so I guess that's how they got in. I now store in qt canning jars with flats and rings and if I get the food dry enough, it keeps all right--but with wood heat the humidity stays low in my house all winter. Oh and I store the jars in a dark closet; one winter I put them on an open shelf in the kitchen (so decorative y'know) but the food (I think it was pears) turned a very unappetizing color and lost flavor. So I lived and learned.

If your dehydrator doesn't have temperatures, but just a low/med/hi gauge as mine does, you might want to stick a room thermometer in it to make sure the temp stays below 110 when you do yogurt. Unsweetened yogurt straight from the dehydrator is the best. All three of my granddaughters love it that way with just a thin drizzle of honey.

I can see a trip to the library for recipes is definitely in order. The lowest setting on my oven if 140. In order to stay below 110 for yogurt I'll have to do it the same way I proof bread..in a closed oven with the light bulb on. In addition to the flavored yogurt we eat for lunches and snacks, I use quite a bit in Mediterranean style cooking.

What's up with the meal moths? I had never experienced them until our infestation 3 years ago. I know exactly which bag of rye flour from the grocery store started the whole thing. Almost everything in my second freezer would normally be a pantry staple. Apparently it's a common enough occurrence that OSU has written a fact sheet. They must be distant cousins of the Energizer bunny....

I think that the meal moths reproduce so rapidly and in such great quantity that it is hard to eliminate all of them at once. A lot of people throw out the infested food and maybe spray the pantry with some sort of insecticide once and think their work is done. In reality, though, the life cycle takes several weeks to complete, so even if you remove all you find, there may be eggs hidden in a different food item or in a crack or a crevice and then they can hatch out after you've "gotten rid" of the meal moths.

I've only had meal moths in the house once, and it took about three weeks to get rid of them all. I think mine came into the house in a sack of flour.

I think pantry traps are pretty effective myself, but then maybe I've just been lucky and our infestation was rather mild. I've also used DE dusted into cracks and crevices. (I use DE for a lot of pests,.)

I've linked the Planet Natural page on controlling meal moths as I think it gives a nice, conscise explanation of their life cycle and how to deal with the pests in a natural, non-chemical manner.

I suspect that everyone has a problem with these at one point or another as they are just so common in stored dry food items.

Here is a link that might be useful: Controlling Indian Meal Moths

I haven't had a problem with meal moths (so that's what they were!) since I threw out those four gallon bags of dried bananas that was full of them. It's wierd how insects can just show up out of nowhere.

I will try the tip about storing the jars in the dark. Maybe that would work for me. I freeze not to preserve the dried stuff but to protect it from absorbing moisture and drawing insects, and, yeah, I guess It's usually dark in that freezer, eh? I store my canned peaches and pears in the dark. This way I do not have to add ascorbic acid. Of course with peaches a lot of that depends on what variety of peaches you have. Mine are Redhaven and I just wouldn't plant anything else. My freezer seems always to be full, though it's getting better now that I'm keeping closer track of what's in it. I would like to be able to store more things without using the freezer, partly because of the footprint thing, and also because I've seen the loss when a storm hits and you don't have any electricity for a week or more. Although if you run a freezer at all, it's better to run a full one than a half-empty one, footprint-wise. Running a dehydrator probably increases your footprint, but so does canning and everything else.

When I buy flour and corn meal at the grocery store, I always tuck them into the freezer for about a week, then take them out and store them in the pantry. Haven't had any problems since.

Our exterminator sprays for ants in the summer and then comes every other month in the winter, spraying for spiders and things. We started using him when we first moved in and the house had roaches. He nipped THAT in the bud! He says he uses our house as a benchmark for ants, though. LOL I know the chemicals are not good but in this case I'd rather have that than the ants, having tried everything else. Last time he was here, he found a black widow spider and said they'd been seeing quite a few of them lately. Those and the brown recluse can do some serious damage to you.

Ilene,

Redhaven is my favorite peach too. Ranger used to be our favorite, but Redhaven makes larger and tastier peaches.

I probably wouldn't store as much in the freezer as I do if our part of Oklahoma was more prone to ice storms/power outages. We've been here ten years now and the longest power outage we've ever had has been less than 2 hours. If I lived in a part of Oklahoma that had more ice storms/power outages, I'd either can more and freeze less or buy a propane-powered refrigerator/freezer as a back-up to the electic one.

And, I guess we have a good chance of rain or snow, depending on where in the state you live, next week although hopefully no ice. I suspect most of y'all have a better chance of getting snow, while down south we have a better chance of getting rain. Maybe the new year will bring us real rain and will be the beginning of the end of the current drought. You've gotta have hope!

Dawn

Redhaven is sure easy to can. It's a freestone, and there's none of that gouging out the red center where the stone was because when they cook, the red disappears. The flavor is just outstanding. Sure makes those canned peaches you get in the store pale by comparison. They are so slimy and have so few actual peaches in the can. I add a little salt and a little vinegar (you don't taste it and it helps preserve the color till you can get them cooked) to the water I slice the peaches into, sweeten them only a little, heat them, and then pack them in the jars. I don't waste space with lots of syrup. We've opened probably five jars since then, divided the contents amongst the three of us, and have enjoyed them immensely. The previous harvest, which was like three years ago, I prepared them the same way, but froze them. They froze really well and held their color after they were thawed, but I didn't have room in the freezer this time.

If you don't have a Redhaven in your yard, Livesay's Orchard has that variety, among others, every year.

I'm using the dehydrate feature for the first time. Given the market value of these puppies, I wish I'd practiced on something else!

{{gwi:333080}}

I should have identified the above photo as morel mushrooms, harvested about 10 minutes before the photo was taken.

OMG!!! I want some of those. I've been trying to hit the right timing for them in my area and haven't had any luck for years now. I am hoping this year to find some but I don't think they come out until around april-may up this way. Bread those babies and deep fry them for breakfast. yum yum

Seedmama! I am envious of those!!! they look great!
I have a dehydration feature on my oven, but I have not used it. I am eager to try it. I need to get the racks for it though. Would love to do a bunch of jerky.
justsaymo

Dana,

They look great. I hope they dehydrated well. I have a big jar of dehydrated mushrooms on a shelf in my pantry, but I didn't collect them locally.

I haven't seen any mushrooms out here yet, but it has been so dry that they may be a bit late here.

Mo,

Since we got the new convection oven last year, I've been a dehydrating fool. During the harvest season, it seems like I am dehydrating something every day.

I haven't made any jerky in this oven, but made it in the past on my American Harvester dehydrator and it was fun.

Dawn

I'm so jealous of the mushrooms!! Mushrooms are tied at the top of my all-time favorite foods list with tomatoes, pickles, and salsa! Yum! I've never picked wild ones, though, because I've not a clue and would end up killing myself with a poisonous one. LOL

I have a big Excalibur dehydrator and love it. I've dried a wide variety of fruits and veggies but I think zucchini slices would be my current fave. It's just so cool to grab a handful to toss into soups and stirfry throughout the winter.

I guess I need to look into the dehydration mode before harvest season gets here. Not sure how long it takes to get the trays ordered and delivered. Used to make jerky when we had the big dehydrater, but I was always disappointed in the fact that my slicing was not even. Have to work on that as well. LOL
I am most eager to dry some tomatoes.
mo

Hi, new here. I just bought a dehydrator and have started expermenting with some of my garden produce thats starting to come in. Mostly bell peppers and summer squash so far.

I have been reading the posts here for a while and love all the dehydrator tips you all have posted. One thing I have found so far, I can't get my Martha Stewart mandolin that I bought at K-Mart to slice the squash thick enough. It says on the box that it is a 3 way slicer, fine, thin, and thick, but so far all I've got the slicer blade to do 2 wasy. Fine & thin. About 1/8th inch. What am I doing wrong?

Pgriff,

I am not sure why it won't slice three ways. If I were you, I'd go to the Harvest Forum and ask this question there. The folks who regularly post on that forum know everything there is to know about preserving food and I bet they'd know why the mandolin isn't adjusting to the third size.

I've linked that forum for you. Just click on the link below.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Harvest Forum