Loving my food dehydrator!

My Ronco Food Dehydrator arrived yesterday. I spent the night cleaning and organizing my kitchen to find a home for it as I hope to get plenty of use from it, so it will have to live in a place undisturbed and out of my way.

At 4 am I put in 2 trays of orange slices, complete with the rind, and 1 tray of sliced mushrooms.  It's a bit after 1 pm now, and from what I can see, things are looking pretty shriveled! lol  I think the oranges might be done, but the mushrooms still look like they could do with more dehydration.

I'm rather impressed!

It isn't very loud at all.  It sounds like water boiling in my non-whistling kettle, or about 1/4 as loud as my wall air conditioner, so it basically sounds like white noise to me.

It's tucked into a very deep corner of my counter where I don't put anything because I can't reach it easily. So it will be perfect there.

I can see myself getting a lot of use from this, especially since I can use it to dehydrate sugar flowers for cakes.

How does your kitchen smell? That's one of the nice things about a dehydrator - you get all the fragrance of whatever you're drying.

jcat said:

How does your kitchen smell? That's one of the nice things about a dehydrator - you get all the fragrance of whatever you're drying.

Click to expand...

I don't smell anything.

I'm off to the store to buy lemons, limes, mint, cucumbers, bananas, celery, carrotrs, onions, and green and red peppers to dehydrate!

This will be so great! I will have dried ingredients on hand for when I want to make something and I don't have the fresh item in my fridge.

The lemon, lime, mint and cucumber are for my water bottles to add some flavour instead of always having to use Crystal Light.

I'm so excited!  I bought lemons, limes and mint to dehydrate. I was walking through the store and looking at stuff thinking "could that be dehydrated?"  LOL

The mushrooms turned out great!  Just like those packing peanuts!  LOL  I think the oranges need some more time.  They're dry, but at the same time the pulp area feels a bit soft, like a dried apricot. Not sure if it's supposed to be rock hard or not.  So I'll leave them in longer.  I've added some sliced lemons; 2 trays.  Too tired to cut up cucumbers and limes tonight.  Only slept about 3 hours.  I'll do limes and cucumber tomorrow. I was going to do pineapple too, but I didn't see any in the produce section and my back was too sore to walk to the other end to grab a can, so I'll do it later.

I also want to try making some kale chips.

Ohhh I've always wondered about dehydrators! So glad to hear you're loving yours!!!

 We need to compare notes!!! Mine is a Nesco American Harvest and it will stack up to 12 trays. I have six trays now and have put extra trays on my Christmas wish list.

I just now finished putting five trays of halved grapes together in my dehydrator to make raisins! I'm running it at 140 degrees and will re-arrange the order of the trays in about five hours or so. My recipe/manual does not say to re-arrange the trays, but I read about it online, so I've started to do that. Since they're halved, they shouldn't take as long; I should have raisins some time tonight.

You knowwwwwwwww...........I have a bag of lemons in the fridge as I type. Hmmmm Stay tuned!

I also bought a bag of lemons. They were cheaper than individual one ($1.00 per small lemon!!!! Yikes).  I didn't know about rearranging trays. I'll try that.  When I put in the lemons, I did put them under the drying oranges though because I didn't want any juice from the lemons dripping onto the oranges and rehydrating them.

The Ronco comes with 6 trays, and I think that is way more than I need.  I've only been using 3 trays.  According to the booklet with the drying guide, different things need different temperatures and lengths of time to dry. 

I've been using 135 degrees for everything so far, but then again other than mushrooms I've only been drying citrus fruits.

Did your lemons get brown as they dried? The reason I'm asking is because I was checking some web pages out and a lot of the lemon slices were really brown. They said it could be caused by over-or-under-drying, too high a temp, too low a temp, etc. What was your temperature and how long did you dry your lemons? Thanks!

The lemons are still drying. It's been about 24 hours at 135 degrees.  I left the oranges in for about 36 hours. At that point the pulp was rock hard.  The pulp in the lemons is about the texture the oranges were at 24 hours.

The lemons have changed colour a little bit.

Thanks.....I'm going to wait and see how yours does. That way I can give my dehydrator a bit of a rest overnight. If you could post a picture, I'd really appreciate it!

Here are the raisins......

I washed and dried the grapes. And then I halved each grape to make for a faster drying time. Had I blanched the grapes to burst the skins, it would have taken 24-36 hours to dry them. This way, it was about 13 hours, still over by about 3 hours, but that's OK.


The grapes on the food trays. I had five trays of grapes til I was done.


After 13 hours in the dehydrator at about 140 degrees. Some of the raisins are darker than others. That's OK. They taste wonderful!


A saucer of the finished raisins. They are still a wee bit sticky, but store-bought raisins are also a little on the sticky side. Some are darker than others, but again, they taste fine. In fact, they taste like raisins! I think I got a little over 2 cups of raisins, which is what I use in one batch of my raisin cookies, so that works. I put them in the freezer as I don't have a food saver or anything like that.

I will post pictures.

Have you seen this site?  http://www.dehydrate2store.com/helpfultips/    I just found it.

Thanks for the link! Checking it out now......

Your results look great!!! I'll have to try the grapes.  My book recommends blanching in order to crack the skin.

Her are my results so far

Oranges


Lemons (they're not done yet. I broke one in 2 and it is still sticky.  I think next batch I'm going to do at a lower temperature for a longer period so that they don't get that dryer exterior with a softer interior)

I turned off the dehydrator about an hour ago.  I'm going to leave the dry lemons out for a couple days and see how they do. If they start to get soft, that means they need more time apparently.  They seem pretty hard even though the pulp feels dry and a bit soft.  I'll let you know how it goes.

I tried a couple slices of lemon in my water.  They don't look like fresh sliced lemons when rehydrated, but they maintain the lemon flavour.

Onions, anybody? They are delicious!

Our store had Buy One, Get One on 3-pound bags of yellow onions. So....I cleaned a bag of onions, sliced them, and threw them into the dehydrator. (Warning: The onion smell is nasty in the beginning! You have been warned!)

I started Saturday afternoon around 1:30 or so. Rotated the trays around 7:00 last night. When I checked them again at 10:00, they still weren't as dry as I'd like. So I left them go overnight.

This morning, I got up and gave the cats their breakfast. And while they were eating, I checked the onions and.....so good!

I sliced some of the onions in simple 3/8-inch slices and put the slices on trays. I sliced some of the onions and then cut them into half moons and put them on trays.

Sliced raw onions.....


Dried onions this morning....they taste wonderful! Nice and crispy. You know, they'd go great with some dip. 
A 3-pound bag of yellow onions gave me probably about 3 cups or so of dried onions. 

I bought onions on Friday to dehydrate. I haven't gotten to them yet.  I was hoping to do them today sometime, or Tuesday evening.  I was going to separate the rings, but now I see that you don't need to; so that's good.

Have you tried to do garlic? I understand you can dehydrate it and grind it up to make garlic powder.  Same with the onions for onion powder.

I have not tried garlic yet, but I'd like to do so. Need to walk over to the farmers market on Wednesday for some.

I was going to try to grind the onions up for onion powder, but I really don't need any right now. I could, however, use some garlic powder.

I put in 2 trays of sliced mushrooms and 3 trays of slice cucumbers. The mushrooms should be ready by this time tomorrow or sooner. The cucumbers because they are so moist, probably 36 hours.

I found a recipe for spicy kale chips. I wish had kept some kale back when I made my kale soup, in order to try it. But there is always next weekend when I go grocery shopping.  I also want to try some pineapple and apple slices this weekend.