We loved my dried orange slices @Don Alaska I used to give our dancing friends a little plate of my own dried fruit at Christmas time. Yep we ate rind and all mine always had a nice “tang” depending on the orange type Friends of ours have a 60 year old orange tree so I’ll have to ask if I can have a bag to dry, their oranges have a nice strong orange taste when made into Jam
My favorite dried fruit was apricots. I use to dry a couple of bushels a year. I made a four-drawer dryer that I used in my large solar garden window. I had a pull-down shade that had a reflective backing that I could close off the garden window with and it built up some serious heat.
It is not the water content. Oranges will dry. They have less water than my tomatoes. And the maters dry just fine. I never actually read my instructions because my driers are idiot proof (and I am in touch with my masculine side). Just one setting and manual vents. I often turn the fruit so it does not stick and rotate the trays. It seems to me I made fruit leather via plastic wrap as I did not use parchment paper. But the latter is probably better.
I have not tried dehydrating fruits but I should. I like fruit a lot! But I had a few herbs that I like to freeze, which are Thyme, Rosemary, and Oregano. I cut them back in the Fall and rinse them clean in cold water; spin them dry in a salad spinner. I pack them in freezer bags and freeze them for a few weeks. I take the bags out of the freezer and take a rolling pin to them while still in the bags. I can scoop out the herbs that have all been rolled off nicely from the twigs and package them in freezer jars to have fresh herbs to use when the snow flies.
Right now I have bananas dehydrating, with apples and kiwi on the tarmac. The one thing I would recommend is that you buy some teflon dehydrator sheets to dry the sticky & juicy stuff on. Once the stuff has "set," it can then go on the mesh sheets for full air circulation. I forgot to do this with the bananas, and it's a pain in the butt to extract them from the mesh sheets, and then scrub the sticky bits off of the mesh sheets. I recalled a recipe I have for "Sunshine Carrots." It's an old Better Homes & Gardens recipe that calls for boiling carrots, then tossing them in a sauce of orange juice, sugar (I use syrup), ginger root, cinnamon and a little butter. I'm going to dehydrate the carrots, toss them in the sauce, then put them back in the dehydrator (on a teflon sheet) for the glaze to intensify and to set. They won't have a long shelf life, but I bet they'll be good to snack on.
My new Nesco Gardenmaster arrived, so I have been reading the instruction book and watching videos for the last hour or so, and now I have the first batch (3 sheets) of the peach roll-ups in to dehydrate. The one I had before was around 30 years ago when I bought it, so this is a much newer version than the old one. I will check the roll-ups tonight and we can see how they turn out, if they need to be thicker or thinner , and stuff like that. I put another quart of milk in the yogurt maker, because I have already used half of the quart I made last night. If these turn out good, then I am going to try some pineapple roll-ups, and then maybe a mix of peach and pineapple. I have been bringing in a few cucumbers from the garden everyday, and we have not been eating all of them, so today, I made some refrigerator relish from the cucumbers, onion, and some red bell pepper for extra color. Since it is not actually canned, it can’t keep indefinitely, but it should do fine in the fridge since it has plenty of salt and vinegar to keep it preserved, and we can use it on sandwiches.
Congrats on the new dehydrator. Mine sat unused for a while, and since I started playing with it again a few days ago, I've not turned it off...and I have a queue of stuff ready to go. I've got access to some surplus cukes. If I mix it with vinegar and onions (but don't can it), about how long do you think I can keep it in the fridge? I also have access to beets, which I'm gonna boil, then slice & dehydrate. Any thoughts on the method?
I think with the vinegar in it, the relish should last at least a couple of weeks, and probably longer, because the salt and vinegar should keep it from spoiling, just like sauerkraut or other pickled foods. I haven’t tried beets, but my book that came with the dehydrator, said to steam until tender, then peel and slice them and dry for 3-10 hours. A long time variance, so it probably depends on how many and how thick the slices are. The book from the Kindle store was a waste (glad I just borrowed it !) so going to look at some other ones tonight, and see if I can find something that is more helpful.
We love dried bananas @John Brunner I always do them in my dryer …as well as apple slices We keep all our dried fruit in the freezer , that way we have guarantee they won’t go off in humid weather We can and do eat fruit semi frozen …..but it’s still soft…. not hard which is a good sign of just how dry the fruit is
Why not just copy/paste each pickling comment here into new comments in the canning thread, Kate. So Copy your comment that's here, Click here to go to the canning thread, Paste it into a new comment, then Post Reply. You'll have to insert the pics using the Image tool. I can do this for you if you don't mind it being under my username.
@John Brunner -- similar to what @Yvonne Smith mentioned, here's a method for making fermented "chow-chow" from an assortment of garden vegetables. (Actual recipe begins at 7:25 mark.)
@Tony Page and I were wondering how the costs of DIY dehydrated food compared with the costs of buying it already dehydrated. Direct comparisons are difficult, but you can get within a range of answers. Store-bought stuff is either freeze-dried (an entirely different process) or is it merely "dried" (meaning there's still some amount of water weight you're paying for.) Dried fruit is more commonly seen at the retail level than dried veggies are, so I thought I'd start there. I just finished dehydrating some pineapple, and think I have quantified some costs. -I bought a whole pineapple at Walmart for $1.78, which yielded 31 oz. of fruit (1 oz shy of 2#.) -This produced 5.2 oz. dehydrated (an 83% weight loss) for a final cost of 34¢ per oz/$5.44 per lb. --A 1# package of store-bought fresh pineapple spears lost 85% of its weight by my calculations when I dehydrated it, so there seems to be a degree of consistency between different pineapples and in my process and measurements. Following are some online prices for dried pineapple (I found one dehydrated product.) These have a higher moisture content than fully dehydrated and some have added sugar, so some of the weight is not pineapple. These first 4 are generic bulk-packs, and lack any nutrition label to see if there is added sugar or preservatives. The product descriptions are silent on the issue. -$4.99 per#: 4# bulk, diced. The comments said there's a lot of sugar that required multiple rinses. -$7.40 per#: 5# bulk, candied rings -$12.95 per#: 1# bulk, rings -$17.99 per#: 1# bulk, diced -$23.99 per#: 1# retail, rings. Kosher, no preservatives, no added sugar -$60.00 per#: 3.5 oz dehydrated. From Sri Lanka, no preservatives, keeps up to 1.5 years I wish I had thought to weigh my pineapple when it hit the stage of "dried" rather than "dehydrated." But it still seems that there is a sizeable cost savings in doing your own.
Terrific breakdown thanks There's also the feeling of "free fruit", this is fruit you bought for consumption but have too much so you dehydrate rather than have it go bad. I used to have dwarf peach tree which produced a lot of fruit in the beginning, I didn't stick to the suggested spray program and pruning program so half the fruit would get buggy, eventually it produce less and less and died. We try to get to a pick your own peach farm once a year, the fruit has higher quality than the grocery store for Less Price, we would normally pick between 5 and 10 lb, there's only so much you can eat or make open face peach pie so we would give a lot of it to family and friends never thought of dehydrating.