Dried and True: Some Tips for Dehydrating Vegetables
Mar 22nd, 2010 | By Esther | Category: Food | Print This Article
Each method of “putting food by” has its pros and cons, in terms of simplicity, flavor, and length of shelf life. Perhaps you had a mother or grandmother who spent days (or weeks) each summer in the kitchen, canning or freezing the garden’s bounty with your willing (or unwilling!) assistance. Another method worth looking at is dehydration. Did you know that only 20 to 30 percent of nutrients are retained by canning, 40 to 60 percent by freezing, but 95 to 97 percent by dehydration? In addition, dehydrated foods take a fraction of the space that canned goods take, and do not require a constant power supply as frozen foods do. Most everyone has had the depressing – and expensive – experience of pitching a freezer full of food after a power outage.
If you’re ready to try your hand at dehydrating food, start with a few basic veggies. Here are some tips… Green beans. One traditional method is to use a needle and thread: Simply run a string through the beans and hang them to dry. Or use your dehydrator, but be sure to blanch the beans first to ensure better flavor. After the beans are dried, they may be shrink-wrapped for further “compactness.” If so, wrap each portion in a paper towel to prevent the beans from poking through the package. When you’re ready to use them, they may be dropped directly into soups and stews However, rehydrate them before using in recipes calling for canned beans.
Potatoes. Modern housing – even in rural areas – most often snubs the idea of the root cellar. Even if you’re fortunate enough to have a root cellar, you may still want to dry a few potatoes, which turns out to be a real space saver (five pounds of potatoes become just one). First, scrub them, and slice them up. Then soak in salt brine for a few minutes to prevent them from turning brown, then place them in the dehydrator for about a day. You can even pre-shred your spuds and dehydrate them to use for hash browns.
Tomatoes. If you’ve got sun, you can take advantage of the free energy; and if necessary, finish the job in the dehydrator. Cut them in quarter-inch wedges, and coat lightly with salt before setting them out. This pre-drying in the sun works well for tomatoes; their water content makes them more challenging in the dehydrator than other produce. When finished, put them in plastic bags or glass jars. You can store them this way for up to 6 months If longer storage is needed, put them in the freezer.
Onions. After removing the outer layer, cut into quarter-inch slices. Dry until brittle. Like green beans, you can drop dried onions directly into soups or stews. Grind in a food mill or blender to make onion flakes or powder; mix powder with an equal amount of salt for homemade onion salt.
The next time you have surplus harvest and want to preserve some for the days of winter – or for times when your food supply is endangered by any number of circumstances – give dehydration a try. And share some of your “dried goods” with your neighbors to let them in on the secret of easy, nutritious preserved food.
©2013 Off The Grid News
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Lets just say we started this process right now, Being we still have power for right now, can I store my dehydrated veggies & fruit in the freezer for longer storage and once we go off the grid pull it all of it out. What would be the safe keeping time then?
For those who dont know what is “Blanching”?
I do a lot of dehydrating of extra veggies from my garden. I like to vaccuum seal my veggies in canning jars, and store them in the kitchen for easy access when I am cooking. I have even dehydrated frozen mixed vegetables (when on sale at the grocery store) because they take up so much space in the freezer, and almost no space when dehydrated. Same thing with hash brown potatos, spinach, shredded cabbage to add to soups, etc. I love dehydrating. Still do the canning, but prefer not to freeze my veggies. The overflow that i don’t want to seal in jars goes into vaccuum sealed storage bags. We eat dehydrated apple slices and banana slices right out of the package. Fruits seem to get sweeter when dehydrated. Love it, love it!
Blanching is simple, get a pot of water to a rolling boil. Drop the veggies in and leave them in for 30-60 seconds, then pull them out and put them straight into an ice bath. This is also helpful for peeling tomatoes and peaches, a step before freezing summer squash (kills the enzymes that would break it down in the freezer), and for preparing broccoli or asparagus for the table.
I’ve always wanted to try squash but thought it would just be mush by winter. Which would be fine for soups and such but I still like some chunks in the soup. What is the best way to freeze squashes and do certain ones work better than others? We have a new rule this summer, when visitors come by, they have to take at least 20 pounds of squash home with them
farmer tim ive harvested squash later in the year n kept it for a few months simply by hangin it in the back of my garage where its stays cool it seems in the open air it tends to dry out some but keeps well this way also a good thing to plant in the fall is turnips cooked properly you wouldnt even know your not eating potatoes of course when squash is hung i dont pierce the skin rather tie the string around the neck of the squash the skin gets kinda hard but you can shave that off fairly easy try this while your squash is putting on real good and let me know how it works for you
I’ve dehydrated small chunks of extra summer squash and zuchinni. I use them in soups and stews instead of chunks of white potato (my husband is diabetic and is not supposed to eat white potatos). Works out pretty good…
I’ve never have tried to dehydrate squash but i see no reason why you could not cut it up in one quarter slices ,blanch it,cool it in ice water ,then lightly salt it and put it in a dehydrator till its good and dry then vacume seal it and put it in the freezer..Even if power was lost you could remove it ,thaw it,let it dry in the sun then store it in jars in a cool area..If anyone knows why this would not work let me know because I think I’ll try this next year..The reason I would redry it after it being in the freezer is sometimes frozen foods will sometimes somehow collect moisture from inside the freezer..
There is a great free site at http://www.dehydrate2store.com. This lady has put up all this work and time filming for everyones benefit. She gets no subsidies, no pay no site fees for doing this. She has been a real blessing for our dehydrated pantry. And yes solar dehydrators work well, but I’ll use my Excalibur as long as there is power! I might have to buy one of those solar generators just to run it! = ) I got my Excalibur on Ebay from the manufacturer. It was a demo model or one that was slightly imperfect. When it came I still got the 10 year warranty, and I still havent found what was “wrong” with it. Works like a dream and I use it all the time. Kids make sure there are fruit roll ups all the time, apple slices are a favorite, vegetables and anything that is starting to look “ify” that I cant use up right away and don’t want to loose. The dehydrate2store site has recipes, demonstrations on every kind of food you can imagine, with all her gleaned knowledge of many books. Hope this steers you in the right direction. I love dehydrating!
Thanks Don for the heads up
Her site has a lot of good information. Don’t assume she is doing it purely as a community service, however. There are affiliate links to companies that provide supplies like dehydrators and mylar bags all over her site.
For Ben and anyone else interested; We have been drying squash for many years. We started with pumpkins (a squash) and have tried others successfully. Cut into 1/8 inch thick rings and string up. We dry them indoors, usually the kitchen on strings across the ceiling (we have a barn-type roof in the kitchen). We grow different kinds of acorn squash (hubbard, this year) that will keep until next spring in a basket in the pantry floor without drying. We also dry peppers, and other things by the same method. We’ve never blanched or salted any of them. This may improve the flavor, I don’t know. We have dried tomatoes on screens in the direct sun (cover them at night). The only thing we’ve ever salted was jerky. Since God was kind enough to provide us with a free dehydrator (the sun), we’ve never seen the need to buy one that takes electricity to work. My wife and I are in our 60′s and have been doing these things since we were children. It is and always was a way of life here, in the woods of S.E. Oklahoma.