How to Preserve Food Quickly and Easily with a Dehydrator

Using a dehydrator to preserve food is a lot quicker and easier than you think. Plus the final products can be stored right in your pantry.

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I grew up in a family that had a large vegetable garden, and my mom canned a lot of the produce to preserve it. Mostly what she canned was whole tomatoes or something tomato-based– a mix of tomatoes, zucchini and green beans with a touch of Italian herbs was a popular concoction.

But I never did like eating those canned tomatoes. I loved helping my mom can tomatoes– something about scalding the fresh tomatoes in boiling water and plunging them into ice-cold water to slip their skins off is still strangely satisfying to me today!

As I got to be in high school, I started making my own jam with raspberries from our garden. My life to that point had been filled with endless jars of concord grape jam I remember my grandma making. So it was a bit of a rebellion to make raspberry jam.

Over time, my mom has canned less and less. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw her can anything. She pretty much freezes what she preserves from the garden these days.

The last time I canned anything was some Tomato Jam back in 2016. It’s just such a PRODUCTION to get all the canning equipment out. And you might as well forget doing anything else that day.

I also freeze most of what I harvest from our garden. But a few years ago (B.C.– before children!) I got curious about dehydrating, or drying food to preserve it. A couple of friends told me how much they used their dehydrators, and the things they made.

Food dehydrator = Easy Food Preservation

I bought a fairly inexpensive, entry-level dehydrator, and it opened a whole new world of food preservation. Here are some of the things I’ve learned, and some tips that will get you started with dehydrating today:

• Prepping food for dehydrating takes a lot less time than canning or freezing. Once you get the food sliced or otherwise prepared, the dehydrator does the work for you. You just have to keep an eye on how dry the food gets.
•  Dehydrating can increase fruit and vegetable consumption in your household. I can’t keep up with the demand for homemade apple chips in our house.
• Dried foods are shelf-stable. I found a new appreciation for this when our deep-freezer died a few years ago. It’s nice to have a freezer full of garden veggies, but if that freezer goes down you’re in trouble. Like canned food, dried foods can stay on the shelf with no refrigeration for years. Now if you don’t eat them within a reasonable timeframe they may not taste as good, but they will still be safe to eat.
  

  Place cored and sliced apples in a single layer on the dehydrator tray for best results.

• My two favorite foods to dehydrate that require very little preparation are: apples and green or colored sweet bell peppers. Store each of these in their own air-tight container, such as a mason jar.
  • Apples: Wash, then remove the core (this is my favorite tool that saves a ton of time) and thinly slice. Place in a single layer on dehydrator trays and dry until crisp at 135°F.
  • Green or colored sweet peppers: Wash, then dice peppers as you would for your favorite recipes. Place in single layer on dehydrator trays with fine mesh insert and dry until completely dry at 135°F.
• There are a lot of very expensive food dehydrators on the market. I’ve had great luck with the relatively inexpensive model listed below. The two books and website listed are the first resources I consult when looking for ideas.

I hope you’ll take this post as inspiration and encouragement to try food dehydating for yourself. I really think its the unsung hero of food preservation and is really a method that fits well with our busy modern lives.

If you’re short on time and garden space, check out how I grow tomatoes in containers at my house— you can grow other vegetables in containers too. If you are wanting to experiment with growing vegetables indoors, check out the Aerogarden. I’ve been growing tomatoes for the last year in mine.

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All Rights Reserved. © 2019 Jennifer Schultz Nelson.

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