Have you used your food dryer to make raisins out of grapes? Try it! Store-bought raisins are tasty and all that, but homemade raisins put the store-bought ones to shame. I expect never to buy commercially-packaged raisins again now that I’ve made my own. Whenever I anticipate wanting raising for cooking, baking, or salads, I load up my dehydrator and let it do its magic.

Making Your Own Raisins

I use only seedless grapes when I make raisins. I can’t imagine trying to remove seeds from grapes, and there’s no way I want to bite into a raisin that has a woody center.

You can skip this step, but it’s not as time-consuming as it might seem. I puncture each grape in two places using the tip of a paring knife. Stabbing the fruits when you dry blueberries is almost imperative, and I’ve added the step to my grape preparations to promote more even and quicker drying.

Which reminds me of something I despise about commercial raisins: many of them have dehydrated stem stubs still attached; I pick through commercial raisins and tear off those stem remnants before I incorporate commercial raisins in my dishes. Happily, when I make my own raisins, I can pick through the grapes and make sure none have stems attached before the grapes go into the dehydrator.

One other thought: grapes skins are impressive water barriers. I stab each grape in at least 2 places to provide places for water to escape from the grapes in the dehydrator. While you don’t have to stab your grapes, I’m convinced they dry a bit faster when you do. In any case, at 135 degrees Fahrenheit, it can take 10, 20, even 30 hours to dehydrate grapes into raisins. Check on them after 10 hours, and, perhaps, every two hours after that until they’re shriveled, pliable, and chewy. Raisins from my food dryer are always plumper than commercial raisins, and they taste much, much better.

As I puncture the grapes I deposit them on my dehydrator trays. By the time I’m done, this tray will be quite full. It’s OK if the grapes touch each other, but don’t pack them in so tightly that they wouldn’t move if you tilted the trays.

These raisins emerged from my food dryer after about 36 hours of drying! A few raisins were still plumper and juicier than is ideal for long-term storage, but these went into a pie within a few hours of leaving the dehydrator. Monitor your drying grapes. If you leave them too long, they become very hard and even brittle; you might actually prefer commercial raisins over ones that dry too long at home.

Technorati Tags: dehydrating fruit, dehydrating grapes, drying fruit, drying grapes, homemade rasisins, making raisins

The method I explain here is very simple and it makes very respectable yogurt. However, Google “how to make yogurt” and you’ll find dozens of articles and videos each having its own spin. Explore, find the method you like best, and still you’ll be able to use your dehydrator as a yogurt incubator.

What You’ll Need to Make Simple Yogurt in a Dehydrator

Let’s keep it simple. To make yogurt, start with the following items:

• 1 quart of milk (skim, 1 percent, 2 percent, or whole… even raw is fine)
• ¼ cup of plain yogurt – use only yogurt that clearly identifies itself as containing live culture—or probiotic.
• 2 quart or larger sauce pot
• Whisk
• Spoon
• Ladle
• A cooking thermometer
• Container(s) with lid(s)—see the box for thoughts about containers

How to Make Yogurt in a Dehydrator

Start by sterilizing the containers in which you’ll incubate your yogurt culture. At the same time, bring the milk to boil. Stir the milk occasionally while it heats, and watch when it boils so you can keep it from boiling over; it will generate foam and try to escape from the cook pot.

Let the milk cool until it reaches 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, add the yogurt to the warm milk and whisk it thoroughly to ensure that the yogurt dissolves through the entire volume of milk.

Fill the containers with the milk and yogurt mixture, cover the containers, and set them into the dehydrator. Set the dehydrator at 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Check the yogurt after four hours. It may have become a very thick liquid, or it may have set up harder than that (encourage a harder set by boiling the milk longer before cooling it). In either case, it’s ready (there may be whey on the surface—a nearly clear liquid). Yogurt becomes tangier as it incubates, and if you let it go much beyond eight hours, it can become far tangier than most people prefer.

When the yogurt is thick or firm, move the containers to the refrigerator and let them sit for several hours to cool. Save ¼ cup of your homemade yogurt to use when you make your next batch; you should never again need store-bought yogurt.

Technorati Tags: yes you can, yogurt

Here’s a way to use a food dryer that raises eyebrows wherever I mention it: Dry tomato skins. I got the idea in a Facebook group about home preserving; one of the participants said that when she cans tomatoes she saves the skins and dehydrates them to use later in soups and sauces. I was canning a lot of tomatoes, so I decided to try it.

Unusual Food Drying

I saved skins from about a quarter of a bushel of tomatoes as I prepared them for canning, diced, in pint jars. When I set the skins on dehydrator trays, I intended not to overlap them, but given how thin they are, I decided they’d be fine even if some stuck together.

I dried the skins at 130F degrees overnight and by afternoon the next day (I didn’t bother to check until then), the skins were dry and brittle.

What to do with dry, brittle tomato skins? I scraped them off the food dryer’s trays into the pitcher of my blender, and pressed them down so they cracked and settled around the blender’s blade. Then I put the lid on the blender and ran it until the tomato skins were powder. Finally, I dumped the powder into a storage container and snapped on the lid.

Using Powdered Tomato Skins

The skins from a half peck of tomatoes dried and pureed into powder only partially fill a small storage container. Will you use tomato powder as seasoning or as soup base?

The skins from a peck of tomatoes aren’t going to stretch far, but if you can a bushel or two of fruit, you’ll build up a compelling store of tomato powder. You might discover that tomato powder makes a great seasoning to set out with your salt and pepper shakers. For more conventional applications, try these proportions.

To make…

…tomato paste, mix one measure of tomato powder with one measure of water.

…tomato sauce, mix one measure of tomato powder with three measures of water.

…tomato juice, mix on measure of tomato powder with one measure of water, and one measure of cream.

Technorati Tags: dried tomatoes, tomato powder, tomatos

I’ve neglected Food Dryer Home because I was writing a book about preserving food! It includes a detailed chapter about dehydrating produce with many step-by-step sequences and photos. Click here to buy your copy from Amazon.com.

It’s no secret that I’ve neglected my blog about dehydrating food. This is, in part, because I was writing a book.

Canning, Freezing, Drying, Fermenting, Sugaring, & Cold Storage

My book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too, from Cool Springs Press, came out in March. It started as an idea for a book about canning produce, but evolved quickly into a survey of most home food-preserving methods.

I wanted Yes, You Can to feel as though you had asked me about preserving produce, and then indulged me by joining me in my kitchen to do a whole bunch of projects. Sure: there’s a linear narrative… we need to preserve some produce, after all. But along the way, there are dozens of digressions: tips, history, stories from my kitchen, and other tidbits to ease the learning process.

Yes, You Can! isn’t one of those dry, gray, “here’s how it’s done” books. It’s loaded with photos that illustrate step-by-step how to complete preserving projects and how to use the foods you’ve preserved. The chapter about dehydrating foods includes instructions for prepping produce, blanching vegetables, and drying vegetables and fruits. It suggests some great snacks to prepare in your dehydrator, and shows how to refill your spice jars from your own herb garden. It even explains how to prepare one of my favorite breakfasts starting with dehydrated shredded potatoes.

I hope you’ll click through to Amazon and see what others have said about my book. I had a great time creating it, and I think you’ll enjoy reading it and working from it.

Technorati Tags: book, yes you can

Please enjoy this article about practical uses for a food dehydrator:

Actually… when I published the article, Google immediately trashed the ranking of my Food Dryer blog. This has become a recurring problem for articles I’ve republished from article services. So… I’ve taken down the original article and have paraphrased it below. Because of this recurring problem, I will no longer publish the full text of previously-published articles in this blog.

I hope you’ll still visit; I’ll continue to post information about drying fruits, vegetables, and meats, and about the equipment available to help with these projects.

My Spin on 11 Ways to use a Food Dryer

An eZine articles piece describing 11 odd but practical uses for a food dryer offers… well, eleven suggestions for how you might use a food dryer. Please visit the original article for details. Here are the suggested uses:

1. DRY PASTA: When you make your own noodles, your dehydrator can dry them quickly.

2. MAKE INSTANT PASTA: Have you ever eaten Ramen noodles? They’re actually dehydrated cooked noodles. This explains why they cook so rapidly. If you dehydrate your own cooked noodles, they’ll rehydrate quickly in boiling hot water.

3. REFRESH CRACKERS: When crackers get soft or a bit stale, revive them with a stint in your food dryer.

4. HUMIDIFY: A food dryer pulls moisture from food, and blows it into the air. If your house is dry, you can add moisture to the air by dehydrating several plates of water.

5. MASK ODORS: Do you want to get that fishy or deep-frying odor out of your house? Run a few slices of orange, lime, lemon, or grapefruit in the dehydrator for several hours.

6. AROMATHERAPY: You can use your food dryer as an aroma therapy diffuser: use your favorite scented oils and herbs, place them in a small open container, and set it on a rack in the dehydrator for the duration of your aromatherapy treatment.

7. MAKE BREAD CRUMBS: It’s easier to make bread crumbs from old bread if you dry the bread thoroughly before grating it or processing it in a food processor. So, first leave the bread in your food dryer until it gets particularly arid..

8. MAKE POTPOURRI: The sky may be the limit on what you include in your own potpourri. Dry citrus peels, herbs, flower petals, and grasses, then mix them in your own blends.

9. MAKE FIRE STARTERS: Apparently, dried citrus peels contain enough oil that they burn very nicely. When you peel an orange, dry the peels thoroughly and add the finished product to your emergency survival kit.

10. SNACKS FOR YOUR PETS: Buy parts of animals that you’d never eat, such as ears, snouts, and feet. Process them in your food dryer, and they make terrific chew-treats for your dogs.

11. VEGETABLE AND FRUIT POWDER SEASONING: An Indian dish I particularly enjoy calls for mango powder, which isn’t available in stores where I live. I can buy whole mangos, slice them up, and dry them in my food dryer. Then I process them to powder in my food processor and I have mango powder. You can do this with any fruit or vegetable to create great seasonings you can’t buy in a grocery store’s spice section.

Technorati Tags: dehydrator, dehydrator projects, food dryer projects

We used a random number generator that selected the following winners:

@igaia who earned an entry in the drawing by tweeting about the giveaway.

@joan_w who also earned an entry in the drawing by tweeting about the giveaway.

@4bratz2luv who earned two entries (among others) by linking to the contest announcement from her blog.

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in the giveaway!

Technorati Tags: dried fruit, fruit snacks, giveaway, promotion

A snack pack of freeze-dried fruit with distinctive tropical flavors. Half the snacks in the carton you could win are these, and half are berry snacks.

Food Dryer Home has found the perfect giveaway to introduce itself to more people: We’re giving away dried fruit!

In our first ever promotional giveaway, we are offering three cartons each holding 24 individual servings of topical snacks and berry snacks. Packaged by Sensible Foods, each serving sells in our local grocery store for $1.70. These dehydrated fruit snacks are low-calorie and delicious; some of the best dehydrated fruit we’ve ever tasted.

Here’s what to do to enter our giveaway:

1. Get one qualified entry by leaving a comment in response to this post. In your comment, tell us what you like to preserve using your food dryer. If you don’t have a food dryer, tell us what you’ll dehydrate when you get one. Multiple comments from the same visitor/email address qualify as a single entry.

2. Get two qualified entries by linking to this post from your own blog or web site. Only one link from a domain will qualify for the two entries. If you’d like to create more links, thanks, but you will earn only two entries. After linking, return here and leave a comment with a link to your web page so we can verify the link… otherwise, we won’t know about it.

3. Get one qualified entry by tweeting a link to this post. In that tweet, mention the twitter name @cityslipper (so we’ll see it and create an entry for you). We’d appreciate multiple tweets, but only one will count as an entry.

4. Visit the two participating blogs where you’ll find a similar post… each of which can earn up to four more entries: One entry for a comment, two entries for a link, and one entry for a tweet. The other participating sites are Small Kitchen Garden and Your Home Kitchen Garden

Multiple entries can increase your chances of winning a carton of fruit, but you cannot win more than one carton per email address or visitor.

This promotional giveaway ends on Friday, November 6, 2009. Our random number generator will select winners on Saturday, November 7 and we’ll post announcements on all three participating web sites.

Technorati Tags: dried fruit, fruit snacks, giveaway, promotion

It’s great to have a food dryer during peak produce season… and better still to have one as the season draws to a close. I had canned many gallons of tomato sauce, salsa, and diced and halved tomatoes, and found myself with several dozen small tomatoes that weren’t destined for a cook pot. Then a friend on Twitter made a comment about drying tomatoes.

If you haven’t dried tomatoes yet, please try it as soon as you can. I dried two dozen tomatoes, watched some friends devour them, and dried another two dozen for myself (I have a very small food dryer).

When you eat a dried tomato, it starts out tough and chewy. However, as it softens, the flavor intensifies, and it explodes into a burst of concentrated tomato sweetness. They’re curiously sensational.

Prepare Tomatoes for your Food Dryer

Captions under the photographs explain the steps I took to prepare my tomatoes for the food dryer. Please give this a try and let me know what you think.

Wash the tomatoes, slice them in half at the equator, and remove the seeds. I removed seeds by gently pressing my pinky finger into each seed pocket thereby squeezing out the seeds and gel into a bowl. Then I filled my food dryer trays with seedless tomato halves, cut-side-up. Finally, I brushed the tomatoes liberally with olive oil.

Note that this was the first time I’d dried tomatoes, and leaving them on a wire rack proved to be a mistake. If such a rack is your only option, cover it with aluminum foil and use the point of a knife to punch a dozen or so slits in the foil.

 

Sprinkle the oily tomatoes lightly with salt, pepper, onion powder, and cayenne pepper.

 

Slice or chop fresh basil, and add some to each tomato. I had several varieties of basil in my garden, so I used one variety on some tomatoes, and another variety on others.

 

Set the tomatoes in your food dryer and let them go for 12 to 24 hours. Alternatively, put them in your oven and bake them very slowly—from 180F degrees to 200. They’re done when they’re shriveled and dry (though they’ll be oily, so it’ll be hard to test one without eating it.

 

The finished tomatoes look like any dried fruit, albeit with seasonings dried in. They’ll keep for several weeks at room-temperature, but eat them before the olive oil on them turns rancid. I’ve heard that some people freeze them, but that seems pointless since you’ve already dried them, and that should preserve them long enough.

Here are some web sites with ideas for how you might use the dehydrated tomatoes you make in your home food dryer. Wherever you see the words “sun dried” in the recipes, substitute an equal portion of your own dried tomatoes:

• Dairy Max Recipe of the Week: Three Cheese Veggie and Beef Calzone – 1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes, drained 6 slices (6 ounces) deli roast beef 3 slices Provolone cheese 1/2 cup (2 ounces) reduced-fat shredded Mozzarella cheese 1 (4-ounce) jar roasted red peppers, drained …

• mio recipe of the week: slow burn sliders! – ½ c. ready to eat sun dried tomatoes, diced ½ c. unsalted or lightly salted cashews, coarsely chopped ½ c. diced red onion (if onion is strong reduce to 1/3 c.) 1 stalk celery, diced ½ c. garden club mayonnaise (where available) …

• Sundried Tomato Pasta Salad « Let’s Get Cookin’! – At my grocery store, I’ve only found the sun dried tomatoes in a plastic container in the produce section. But you may find them in a jar, packed in oil. If you buy the jarred kind, be sure to drain them well before proceeding. …

• 2009 May Free Online Recipes Free Recipes – This is one of the best Asian Shrimp dishes I have made in awhile. Szechuan shrimp may indeed even be better than my Szechuan chicken recipe ! A few Chinese shrimp recipes I have tried have been rather disappointing but this was really a hit. Best of all, it calls for precooked shrimp so there is little to no work needed.

Technorati Tags: dehydrate tomatoes, dried tomatoes, dry fruit, dry vegetables, tomatoes

I’ve lined up several jerky recipes for the coming months. This one is a bit exotic. I hope you enjoy it!

Hawaiian Beef Jerky

Delicious Hawaiian Beef Jerky Recipe

By Caleb Liu

When you think Hawaii, you may think of tropical. And when you think tropical, you think of pineapple. But that is just one of the many tastes associated with the Pacific Island state. Hawaii is really a melting pot of a state and a melting pot of cultures; much of their food has a blend of flavors.

When it comes to a beef jerky recipe with a Hawaiian flair, it’s no wonder then that there are a variety of flavors that will create a luau inside anyone’s mouth!

Below is a recipe for Hawaiian beef jerky. This recipe, as mentioned above contains several different flavor bursts. There is some ginger for spice. Some brown sugar for sweetness. Some pepper and Cayenne pepper for a little fire. Some soy sauce for saltiness. And we can’t forget that pineapple.

Ingredients:

• 1 lb lean meat, thinly sliced

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 tsp ground ginger

• 1 tbsp brown sugar

• 1/4 tsp pepper

• 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper

• 1 crushed garlic clove

• 1/4 c pineapple juice

• 1/4 c soy sauce

Directions:

1. Slice meat in thin strips.

2. In a bowl, combine all ingredients of marinade and mix well.

3. Place meat 3-4 layers deep in a container, spooning sauce mixture over each layer.

4. Cover tightly and marinate 6-12 hours in the refrigerator, stirring occasionally.

5. Layout on trays, 24 to 36 hours in dehydrator (or follow directions for oven).

Now all you need is a grass skirt and some coconut milk!

REVIEW: Not sure if you can make your own?

Analei V. of Salem always wanted to go to Hawaii. At least she got a taste of Hawaiian beef jerky when she tried a piece of her friend’s Holston Mountain Hawaiian Beef Jerky. The website said that the jerky is sweeter than its other flavors. Analei agreed saying, “There was a real hint of pineapple, which was an interesting combination for beef. I am so used to pineapple being on ham. This was a unique jerky. I didn’t even know you could have fruity jerky! The piece of jerky was huge, too. I am used to thin sticks, but this was an enormous piece. A little hard to chew.” The Holston Mountain Hawaiian Jerky is available on their website in three sizes from $8-$21.

If you found this information on hawaiian beef jerky useful, you’ll want to read this article about beef jerky seasoning salt.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Caleb_Liu
http://EzineArticles.com/?Hawaiian-Beef-Jerky—Delicious-Hawaiian-Beef-Jerky-Recipe&id=554277

Technorati Tags: Beef jerky, dehydrator, making jerky

Today’s guest describes several ways to preserve chili peppers. The ideas are useful, but sometimes short on detail. For example, because he doesn’t have a food dryer, he glosses over using one to dry chilies. I’d encourage you to use your food dryer (if you have one) to dry cut-up sections of larger peppers, or to dry whole fruits of the smaller pepper varieties.

Of course, there are other alternatives as well. If you like pickles, try pickling your peppers. Or, make sweet pepper relish like the one described here: Red Pepper Relish from Your Home Kitchen Garden.

Great Tips For Preserving Chilies

Great Tips For Preserving Chilies

By Ric Wiley

There are several ways of preserving chilies and my favorite has to be drying, but more of that later.

The simplest way to preserve a chili is to freeze it. One of the major problems with this is that the chili then loses its eating quality. If you eat a raw chili, and be very careful here about the strength of any chili you eat, there is a crispy crunchy texture to the chili. If you defrost a chili and try this then you will find that this crispness has gone and the texture is soggy. This may not be a problem depending on what you intend to use the chili for. If it is to cook with then there are no drawbacks to freezing and I often just cut the stalk off the chilies and put them through a food processor to make a firm paste which I then freeze in ice cube trays. Once these are frozen I can put them in a bag and take out as many as I need to cook with.

Another way is to make some chili oil. There are many recipes on the internet for this and I suggest you try one of these but they all follow similar principles. Use top quality olive oil as the base, chop your chilies, add other ingredients and gently cook your ingredients in the oil. When finished allow to cool and strain the ingredients out. Bottle the chili oil. When I make this I only make small quantities as I have read that as the oil has had other ingredients added then bacteria could develop over time. I have seen it recommended that you should not keep home made chili oil more than about one month. Just remember that the more chilies you add the stronger the heat. I one tried adding some hot home made chili oil to a salad dressing. It ruined the salad so just think about what you are going to use it for.

As I have already mentioned, my favorite way of preserving chilies has to be drying and there are a few ways of doing this, some complicated, some easy. You can dry them overnight in an oven at a very low setting but I have never done this as it just seems too complicated. As easier way, (if you have one), is to use a food dryer and set this to the time recommended by your manufacturer. For those of you who do not have a food dryer, you simply space the food out on trays and switch it on. It dehumidifies the food and removes the moisture, preserving it over time. Simple enough to use, but I do not have one and I do not fancy spending lots of money to buy one just to dry chilies.

A shopkeeper in an Asian supermarket I use once told me the best way to dry chilies is simply to wrap a bunch of chilies in newspaper, put it on the top of a cupboard and just leave them. I tried this but one of the chilies rotted and this spoiled several more. If you use this method check them regularly for chilies which are spoiling. Another method is to string the chilies and air dry. Do this by threading the chilies using a needle on to a strong thread and hanging in a warm room to dry.

Whilst both these methods work, I have also tried two more methods. One is to dry them in a muslin bag next to a radiator. This works very well but the chilies dry very fast and become hard, so hard in fact that you cannot easily cut them with a knife. This is fine if you want to grind the chilies into chili powder or flakes for cooking but they are not too good for eating.

My favorite method of drying chilies is to simply put them in a tray and dry them on a windowsill. This is near a radiator but this is not always on. The windowsill gets sun on it for about 5 hours a day, (when it is sunny). Every couple of days, I simply stir the chilies up with my fingers and this also allows me to spot any which are spoiling. I remove these. The chilies are finished when I feel they are dry enough but still feel leathery. At this stage I simply keep them in an old biscuit tin and use them as needed. One thing I do though is keep the green stalks on the end of the chilies as these help to draw the moisture out from the middle of the chili. I cut this off when using the dried chilies.

Whichever method you use just make sure that surfaces and any utensils you use are clean as you do not want to introduce any disease to your harvest. You can also start the drying process off by leaving the chilies on the plant and not watering but only do this at the end of the growing season when production of new chilies has stopped. By leaving the chilies on the plant they will start to dry out naturally. Just watch them for mold or rot though and harvest immediately this is spotted on any plant.

To find out how easy it is to grow your own chillies, harvest and preserve them, check out http://www.highdensitygardening.com/home.html

Ric Wiley is an internet writer and gardener. His latest website about High Density Gardening can be found at http://www.highdensitygardening.com/home.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ric_Wiley
http://EzineArticles.com/?Great-Tips-For-Preserving-Chilies&id=1393556

Technorati Tags: chili, chilies, dried chilies, drying chilies