Food dehydrators :)

Whoops! What I meant was food dehydrators! Duh!
Anyone have one or recommend a brand? I need to get one as a gift and need ideas. Thanks.

Can you even buy those anymore? The only one I knew of was the "Ronco" by Ron Popiel, and I haven't heard anything about that one in ages.

I had my mom's old one years ago and gave it away!! It was huge like a big microwave oven!! I set it up on a card table and when I used in summer had it outside as so not to heat the house up!!

Do you have a fleet farm in the area as I know you can get them there-they are the smaller round ones though.

You can use your oven and microwave to dehydrate stuff.

with my mom's I made fruit leathers-they still took alot of time though.

For food processors - oops! - dehydrators (couldn't resist), I would go to Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&sear...ydrator&page=1

This is nice because it gives customer reviews and some of the ones that seem to be popular because of price got lousy reviews. It looks like the best ones are in the $60 range.

Hope this helps.

Originally Posted by butzie

For food processors - oops! - dehydrators (couldn't resist), I would go to Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&sear...ydrator&page=1

This is nice because it gives customer reviews and some of the ones that seem to be popular because of price got lousy reviews. It looks like the best ones are in the $60 range.

Hope this helps.

Click to expand...

Thanks! I read the reviews and think I'll go with this one:
Nesco FD-60 Snackmaster Express Food Dehydrator
but they actually have them at Walmart for like $45 so there I go! I'm so excited, I'm getting him two books to help him with it, and we have herbs growing in our Aero garden right now so he can dry them in it.

Old thread I know, but relevant.

I ordered a Ronco food dehydrator yesterday.  LOL New and improved apparently. So I'll let you all know how it goes.

I plan on dehydrating some fruits such as lemons, limes, oranges so that I can keep them at work and add them to my water bottle.

I also tend to buy stuff with intention of using it for meals, only for it to go bad in the fridge because I don't follow through. Things such as mushrooms, fresh herbs and even onions.  This way I can dehydrate them before they spoil and keep them in a plastic bag.  Or so that is the plan! lol

They work really well for those foods. I don't think we've ever dehydrated citrus fruits; sometimes you have to put fruit with a lot of juice in again for another couple of hours. Apple and pear chips are great - you can make your own müsli ahead of time and then just add water or milk to rehydrate the fruit. DH sometimes dehydrates bananas (which I can't stand) and grapes. He also makes his own herbal teas.

I've dehydrated catnip from the plants we have outside.

The new Ronco claims to be 2 to 3 times faster.  I have 30 days to evaluate and can return it if I'm not happy with it.  I did Google to look for reviews and they weren't bad which is what prompted me to order.  I've bought Ronco things in the past and have been happy with the items, so it's a brand that seems to be able to be trusted.

http://www.theshoppingchannel.com/R...-Dehydrator/pages/productdetails?nav=R:512183

A lot will depend on how many watts it has - I don't see that listed. Ours is 700 W with 6 trays; IIRC, it came with 4 and we bought 2 extra. It's a bit loud.

I Googled. It's 240 watt with a drying fan and several temperatures to choose from.  Again, Most of the reviews I've read about this particular one have been favourable.  So I'll try it for 30 days and see.

I just thought of something too.  I took a cake decorating course and I could probably use this to help along the process of drying Royal Icing and Gum Paste flowers instead of leaving them laying around on my counters for days.

We have a Nesco American Harvest dehydrator and it works beautifully. You can have up to 12 trays of food on it at one time. There is a newer version out on Amazon now.


It has temperature controls (I wouldn't buy one without controls. It's fairly quiet, too, which is important if you're going to run it overnight. No ON/OFF switch. To turn it on, you plug it in and to turn it off, you unplug it. 700 watts, I believe.

It works very well. My kids gave it to me a couple years ago for Christmas. I've asked Santa for more trays as I only have six.

Ours takes up to 8 trays, but doesn't have too many temperature settings. The timer does turn it off.
Another thing it's great for is hot peppers, which DH eats with dinner just about every day (and Mogli thinks are great cat toys).

I haven't tried to dry peppers. I would like to try to dry some mushrooms so that I could keep them on hand to add to soups and such.

One of our grocery stores has seedless green grapes on sale for $0.88 a pound with a 5-pound limit. So I bought five pounds and this weekend, I'll wash them, dry them, and try making some raisins in the dehydrator. I've heard that once you make your own, you'll never go back to store-bought again, so we'll see. My sister is very curious about it because her grapes are ripening well. She wants to make sugar-free jelly, but she also wants to try raisins, too. (Her grapes are not seedless, though, so we'd have to seed them before doing anything.)

Most places I've looked say to halve the grapes; that way, it won't take as long to dry them. I think I'll try them that way and see what happens.

Rick has been wanting to try to make jerky. He's been talking about it ever since we got the dehydrator, but hasn't done anything. So I think that I'm going to try jerky on Sunday. If I can start the grapes on Friday night, they should be ready by Saturday night. I'm thinking that anyway.

Stay tuned!

I can't wait for mine to arrive!!! I talked to my cake decorating teacher and she said that a food dehydrator would be great for drying gum paste and royal icing flowers, but that they would have to be dried slowly so they wouldn't crack.

As it is, when I make flowers, I leave them around the counter tops. Now while my cats don't get onto the counters, their hair does.  So IMHO that really isn't very hygienic to be leaving "food" laying around where their cat hair can get to it, and then using those flowers to decorate cakes.  So far I haven't really used royal icing or gum paste to decorate anything, my attempts have been for practicing only.  But I do like the idea of making the item, putting them into a covered dehydrator and then right into a covered box for storage.

I never thought about using a dehydrator for cake flowers! Neat idea!