Dehydrating Food at Home - Food Preservation - Ep10

Food preservation methods are a great way to up your food storage game. Join me for a discussion about dehydrating food at home. What it is, various dehydration methods, and more.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to this Prepared Life podcast where homestudying and the apocalypse meet. I'm Alison, your host. Hello, and welcome to This Prepared Life. If you missed it, this month is National Preparedness Month. And if you follow me on Instagram, there's no way you could have missed it. So if you are listening to this and going, what is National Preparedness Month? Head on over to Instagram, follow me over there, and there's just a wealth of information waiting. I am part of a collaboration called Women Who Prep with six other women, and we are all preppers in some way, shape, or form. And this has been an amazing month. We started the month with five different topics, and each week we have been sharing our tips, our skills, different information on that topic. Some topics have been general, and some topics have really dived deep into specifics. And it has been so exciting to see so many of you using the hashtag womenWhoPrep. I love seeing your tips and your tricks when I go over to the hashtag and look through those. There have been great conversations in the comments, and it has just been an amazing month of preparedness information. So if you missed it, you can still go back and check it out. All the posts are on our Instagram pages. And I have also added a highlight to my profile called Women Who Prep One and Women Who Prep Two. I had to do two as you can only have a hundred slides in each highlight. And this is there's seven of us with daily postings. So there have been a lot of posts. So go check those out. And you can also click on any of my posts and scroll down the caption, and you will see links to each of the seven collaborators if you want to go check their posts out. They have just been a wealth of information and knowledge, and these ladies are so helpful and willing to share information. So please do not hesitate to ask questions. So this week, our topic, and it's our final topic of the month, is all about self-sufficiency. Food plays a huge part in being self-sufficient here at our homestead. And with one of our goals being how much of our own food can we produce on our own? But in addition to that, we have to do something with that food. We can't just grow it and let it sit because it's gonna go bad. So one thing I have to think about is not only how am I going to grow that food, but how am I going to preserve that food. So today I am going to dive into another food preservation topic. We're going to talk about dehydration as a method of food preservation. So dehydration is one of the first methods that I started doing along with canning, which I talked about in episode five. So go check that out if you are wanting to get started on canning. But dehydration is so easy. It might look technical and complex, but it really isn't. And I think if you just jump in and get started, you are going to be amazed and surprised at how easy it is to dehydrate food. So it can be done relatively low cost, and the foods can last for up to a year and sometimes several years, depending on how you store or package them and what it is. So, first let's talk about exactly what is dehydration. And dehydration is the process of removing moisture from food to improve the shelf life and inhibit the growth of bacteria, yeast, and mold. So essentially, you just want to remove enough of the moisture that that food is not going to go bad. So dehydration removes 80 to 90% of the moisture in food, and it is typically done using low heat and moving air. There are a lot of ways to dehydrate. Some of them can be done completely off grid, some of them require power. And I'm gonna go through some of those and we'll start with sun drying. This is probably the oldest method of dehydration. In Little House on the Prairie on the banks of Plum Creek, Ma Ingles dried plums on sheets in the sun. People have been doing this for so many years, harnessing the power of the sun to dry food. Sun drying, it takes a little longer than if you were using like an electric dehydrator with a fan. It can be harder in areas with high humidity because you're trying to remove moisture, but the air is full of moisture. So one of the things that you can do for sun drying is you can place the food on screens to help it with airflow. And if you go online and Google, there are so many different things people have built and created to sun dehydrate foods. And if dehydration is in your proper plan of something that you want to be able to do in a worst case scenario, those are things you can start learning now and start building something that will work and experimenting and practicing. The next one is air drying, and this is another old method that people have been using forever, very similar to sun drying, but this one is done in shade, and it is typically done to protect delicate things that the sun might damage, like herbs or greens, things like that. So, same concepts apply. You might want to do that on screens. You're just doing it outside in the shade, not in the sun. Another one is solar dehydrators, and these are things that you can build or buy and they're fully contained. Think of it kind of like a mini greenhouse, and these can be small and fit on top of a table. These can be massively large and are their own self-standing unit. A sun dehydrator requires no electricity because it has it doesn't have a fan that is moving air. So again, I'm not going to go into how to build one. If you if that is the method you want to do, hop online and do some research because these are great. And I have seen people just make amazing things in their solar dehydrators. Another option is oven drying. And this is a great option to try out. If you're not even sure, maybe do you like dehydrated food? Maybe you don't know. One of the downsides of oven dehydrating is that it's not super efficient. An oven is big, you have a lot of space in there, but you can only fit so much food in. It also heats up your house. So if it is peak summer season, you are harvesting this food out of your garden or getting it at the local farmer's market. It's already hot outside. Do you really want to be heating up your house? So with oven drying, one of the most important things to check is does your oven go low enough? Again, dehydration is low heat. So you need 140 degrees or lower, depending on the item you're dehydrating. My dehydrator dries herbs at 95 degrees and all my fruits and vegetables at 125. So if you are going up to 140 or higher, you're going to be cooking things, not as much dehydrating them. So before you choose this as an option, check if your oven will even go that low. Some will not. The probably most used method are electric dehydrators. These usually use heat. Some of them have a fan that moves air, some of them do not have a fan. They are quick, they are efficient, they can be relatively cheap, they can be expensive. I currently have two electric dehydrators. And one of them is um super high-tech, it beeps at me, it has a temperature control, it has a timer. I absolutely love it. The other one was my grandmother's, and when she passed away, I brought it home and it's round and it has trays that stack up on each other, and it uses heat and a small fan, and that thing works amazing. And I think I have seen that same brand or a similar brand for under $100 at the feed store. So you do not have to have the high-tech several hundred dollar machine to make dehydration work for your family. Years and years and years ago, and I think this is just a hilarious story, but um Joe and I were going to Costco and I was talking to him about, oh, I really want a dehydrator and I would like to save for this. And you know, this was back in the day of we had all of these little kids and we are our budget was very, very tight. Um, you know, we have survived on one income by making choices. And so sometimes that meant, you know, we didn't have all these cool gadgets, and I did not own a dehydrator. And I we're pulling into the Costco parking lot, and I'm like, yeah, I just really want to save for a dehydrator. And sitting in the parking spot next to where we had pulled our car in was a garbage bag. And it didn't look like it was full of garbage, it was just like one thing and it was kind of half open. And I'm sitting there looking at that, and I'm like, Joe, is that a dehydrator? And he's like, I don't know. And I'm looking, I'm like, Joe, that's a dehydrator. And it really looked like maybe someone had a bag of stuff that was going to Goodwill or the thrift store or wherever, and maybe they made too big of a Costco run, and so they left their bag sitting in the parking lot. That's my guess. But it was a dehydrator and it was just a heat dehydrator. It had no fan, it had, I think, seven or eight trays that stacked up on top of each other with this little lid with a vent that I could open or close. And I got out of the car and I went over there and I'm like, okay, are there any bugs, trash? Is this a disgusting bag of grossness? It wasn't, it was just the dehydrator. And I put that dehydrator in my car so fast, and Joe was shaking his head at me. But we had a dehydrator, and that is what I started with a free garbage dehydrator I found in the Costco parking lot. So um, I just thought it was hilarious that it was literally 30 seconds after I'm like, yeah, I really want to save for a dehydrator, and there was one in the parking lot for me. So that was just a funny story of my journey to dehydration. I did thoroughly clean the thing and sanitize everything. Dehydrating food. How to dehydrate food? Um, the first thing you do is you prep the food, and that's gonna be different depending on what it is. Some foods need peeled, some don't. Some vegetables need blanched. Blanching is a process of dipping the food into boiling water for a set amount of time and then removing it to an ice bath. And what this does is it stops the enzyme action in that food that causes loss of nutrients, loss of flavor, loss of color, and loss of texture. So, and you also do this for freezing certain foods. Blanching is really important for some things and not others. So you're gonna need to get yourself a book or um do some research online for what foods need blanched and what foods do not need blanched. Um, with some fruit, you need to prep it by dipping it in something. You know, apples turn brown as as they hit air and that oxidization process happens. So, one way to prevent that is to put some kind of acid on the outside. You can use a citric acid solution. I will typically just dip my stuffed lemon juice. So as I'm like cutting, it goes into a bowl of lemon juice, and then I put it in a strainer and it drips a bit before it goes onto my dehydrator trays. You're prepping your food by peeling or slicing or chopping or pureeing if you're making fruit leather, and then you're gonna dehydrate it. And the amount of time that dehydration process takes is gonna vary by one, your dehydrator and the method you're using. Sun-drying something on racks is gonna take a lot longer than if you have a fancy dehydrator that is moving air and heat around. The humidity in your air is going to affect how long that process takes. So you just kind of need there's some guidelines online and you just need to play around with what works best for your area. And then the final process of how to dehydrate food is to store it. All of my dehydrated food is going into my short-term layer. So nothing I am dehydrating at home is meant for my long-term layer. So all of that food is going into mason jars and I am vacuum sealing those with my vacuum sealer because all of that food is going to get eaten within a year. I do have dehydrated foods in my long-term layer, but I have purchased them dehydrated in number 10 cans. You can dehydrate food and put it into a mylar bag and store that, but I personally have not tested length of time that home dehydrated food is going to be good for. And purchased dehydrated food, I think sometimes does have a longer shelf life because their equipment can remove moisture better. Some of my favorite things to dehydrate are fruit leathers, apples, pears, peaches, Asian pears, plums. I dehydrate as many of my own herbs as I can for cooking and for tea. I dehydrate shredded zucchini and shredded yellow squash, and also zucchini and squash chips. Those are great to throw in soups and stir fries. I have dehydrated carrots. Um, we have done jerky. And one thing I will caution um on is onions and garlic. I tend to buy those because they make my house smell awful. And I don't have a place outside where I can put my dehydrator and keep it protected from bugs and cudders. If you are going to dehydrate onions or garlic, just know that your whole house smells like onions and garlic for days. Another thing I've dehydrated is cabbage, and it worked amazing, but it also made my house smell so funky, but not bad enough that I won't do it again. Having shredded cabbage to throw in soups was great. So I really liked that. But so many things can be dehydrated, and you need to just think about what my family eat? What does my family like to eat? Because if your family doesn't like fruit leather, why dehydrate fruit leather? Again, it is about what does your family like? So think about those things, make a list, think about can I grow this on my own and dehydrate it? Is there a local farmer I can find it from and dehydrate it? How can I get things in bulk that I'm going to then pump through my dehydrator? And now you have your year's supply of apple chips until next apple season. It's it's all about the layer. So this was really quick and short, and I really hope that it gave you some information to dig into further about dehydrating. I hope it gave you some motivation to get started in dehydrating food for your family. It really is an easy and relatively low cost option to preserve the harvest. Thanks for listening today, and until next time. Remember, every little thing matters, and a goal without a plan is just a wish. If you have any questions, feel free and find me on Instagram at this prepared life. You can also visit this preparedlife.blogspot.com. 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