My Christmas and Birthday gifts came Early! We've been trying to get the right tools over time, as circumstances allow, so that we can become a lot more efficient and cost effective with our food budget/storage. While we are really not getting very good production out of our gardening attempts, we obviously buy food. No reason we can't be stocking up the dehydrated pantry with some of that produce.
In the future we will be selling our deep freeze in order to replace it with an upright freezer. The deep freezer is too cumbersome. We find it difficult to bend into it to find what we want. We have a ton of food spoilage because we "lose" food into the frozen abyss. I'm sure those of you with them know exactly what I'm talking about. Other things we want to do include building a root cellar, solar dehydrator, and do more pressure canning, etc. Those are all high on our food preservation list. To be honest, I would prefer to go totally off grid in the food storage department. I really don't want to have a fridge or freezer. I'm not the only one who gets a say, but that doesn't mean I can transition my food to dehydrated goods. This is a long term investment I hope will pay off greatly.
This is the one we went with. Because it has the stainless steel trays and can get up to 167 degrees F. Eventually, we will have a solar dehydrator. But as of now, we have too much food spoilage, our freezer is out of control, and our food storage is in complete disarray.
Haven't finished clearing out space where I need to set this up at, so it's not completely unpacked. Anxious to give her a whirl.
Super excited!!! Stay tuned …Please consider upvoting, resteeming, following, and commenting if you like.
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I look forward to seeing how you use it! I just got a similar one from a friend and need to put it to work :)
I'm pretty excited. I've been really busy trying to clear out a place for it go. It's about as large as two microwaves, one stacked on top of another. Do you have the Excalibur? I was looking at that one. It seems to be the most popular one of this style. People absolutely rave about it. The cost of the stainless steel ones was way too much. I think the first thing I'm going to start with is dehydrating some precooked meats and seafood. Also cleaning out of the freezer to dehydrate all those frozen veggies. I also want to try dehydrating canned beans to see how well they rehydrate because they are loaded with salt. If you rehydrate uncooked beans, cooking them with salt before they are tender will not let them get soft enough. I've got precooked frozen shrimp that will be the first thing I try. I dehydrated them before several years ago in one of those circle dehydrators. They were nice and crispy. This is a better dehydrator so it will be fun seeing how fast and evenly it works without having to rotate and baby the trays.
Not an Excalibur. Ours is a Cabela's pro series ten tray dehydrator that was loaned from my best friend. It was taking up space not being used in his storage unit, so he loaned it to us to use.
Sounds like there's not much you can't dehydrate, which is awesome! I may try making my own jerky, as it's an expensive staple in my lunches at work every day. Costs us about $40 a month, so if I could get good beef and make my own, that could translate to a significant savings on our food budget!
As a kid, I remember making dehydrated apples, which was my favorite. Bananas and raisins too. We dehydrated a lot. I'd like to bring that back into our lives.
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