Most of us just cut them up and freeze them in 1/2 cup portions in small plastic bags, then put those bags in a larger container. Ready for cooking.

Yeah. I have a bunch of those already. I still have MOOR to chop and my family is getting tired of the eye burn and smell hahaha I might hafta get up early when it's cool and chop chop chop on the front porch, just to get them all finished.

Wow. I thought I had researched it fully. Sorry about that.

hey, um, I was just reading that page about an oven taking twice as long as food dehydrator because there is no fan for air movement.

I'm thinking: if I prop the oven door open and place a computer fan at its entrance maybe that might shorten the drying time? I should try it and monitor the difference.

After seeing all those recipes, I think I might just get me a food dehydrator!

Bon, Nothing to apologize far. Sometimes there is so much available on the internet that it is hard to wade through it all. I always just start with the NCHFP website and take it from there when I have a food preserving question. The first thing I have learned is that if the NCHFP doesn't mention preserving a specific food item using a specific method, then I don't even have to look any further because that means there isn't a safety-approved method.

A standard oven does lack a fan and placing a fan near stove might help. Probably couldn't hurt. Convection ovens have fans and that helps food in them dehydrate pretty quickly.

Generally you can find small food dehydrators even at places like Wal-Mart for a very reasonable price. Sometimes you can even buy extra trays above and beyond the number of trays that come with the dehydrator, and if that is the case, having more trays allows you to dehydrate bigger batches at one time. That's what I used for many years until we bought a stove with a convection oven that has a Dehydrate Mode, and the countertop dehydrator worked fine for dehydrating veggies and fruits, and even for making jerky. We just stumbled into buying a stove with a Dehydrate Mode, as the salesman never mentioned it and I only learned the stove had that feature while I was reading the Instruction Manual as we were driving home. I have been pleasantly surprised by how well it works, but you also can dry food in a normal oven set at a low setting.

If drying the food outside was your only option and you wanted to try it, you could cover the food with some sort of thin fabric, like a floating row cover or a sheer curtain, but you'd be operating outside NCHFP guidelines and would be on your own, safety-wise. With the dewpoints and relative humidity values we have this week, I don't think drying onions or anything else outdoors would work out well. It might be something you could do in a very hot, very dry summer when dewpoints and relative humidity values are low. I can dry tomatoes like Principe' Borghese outdoors (but under a roof like a porch roof or patio cover) by pulling up the entire plant and hanging it upside down to dry in a very dry summer, like when we are in Severe, Extreme or Exceptional Drought and have low humidity all the time, but cannot do it in a normal summer because the fruit will develop mold before they can dry if we have much humidity at all, even for just a limited time like in the early morning hours.

Be advised that most people do not like smelling onions dehydrating all day and you might hear some complaining about that pervasive onion aroma. Most foods make the house smell yummy when dehydrating, but the onion aroma is too much for some folks. My family doesn't like it when I dehydrate habanero peppers in the oven, and I can understand that as the fumes can make a person pretty miserable, so that's a job best completed when everyone is outdoors for the day.

Dawn

I put my dehydrater in the garage. It is annoyingly loud. Cheap round model. When I dried cayennes, I put it on the patio. I dried garlic last year and made garlic powder, but last year's garlic wasn't very strong. I was looking for that website, Dawn. I must have saved it somewhere, I've used it before, but I couldn't find it. Glad yuo posted it again!

Glad it was helpful, Amy. Next time instead of spending time looking, just come here and ask what the website is for approved canning practices and I bet at least a dozen different people here instantly could link it for you.