Drying is one of our favorite methods of preserving food and it just happens to be the method that’s been around the longest too. The benefits of drying are that you can fit a lot more food in a lot less space. Also, dried food can sit in a jar on the shelf and stay good for a long time, while not requiring any electricity to keep it that way. If you dehydrate your food at low temperatures, it also preserves so much more of the nutrients than other preserving methods.
Recently we just dried two foods I had never dried before- zucchini and blueberries- and it felt like a revelation to me!
I’m often asked what our favorite recipes are. If you would have asked me a few weeks ago what our favorite blueberry recipes are, I would have said (with laughter) :
Wilson Family Blueberry Recipes:
Recipe #1: Pick fresh. Pop in mouth.
Recipe #2: Put in freezer. Later, put in bowl. Thawing optional. Pop in mouth.
Now, I am happy to say that we can add a third one- drying! Jeff and I had never dried them before and I must say, they are absolutely delicious! We have been blessed with an abundance of blueberries this year and we’ve been working hard to bring in the harvest. After filling a lot of freezer space, we started drying them. Now we have a gallon of dried blueberries! (With more drying as we speak.) Let me tell you, it takes a lot of picking to get a gallon of dried blueberries, since they shrink so much! A lot of hard work went into that gallon, which makes each and every berry taste that much better!
The other drying discovery was new for me, but not for Jeff. He had dried zucchini before, but not since I’d been here. With our prolific zucchini, we’ve been happily eating loads of it (we love zucchini.) We shared some with loved ones in need of fresh, garden food. Then we still had some leftover. (You zucchini growers know how that goes!) We didn’t want any to go to waste. But we didn’t want to use precious freezer space for it, since it’s dedicated to berries, so we dried it. We plan on putting the dried zucchini in soups throughout the winter. Jeff says it’s great. I’m taking his word for it, since I have yet to try it.
I felt like sharing in case you were wondering about another way to preserve your zucchini abundance. If you do, a tip: use smaller zucchinis, before the seeds get too huge, which won’t be that great dried.
As for the dehydrator, we are just using a 40 dollar one we got on sale at a local store. It’s plastic, which in our mind, is not an ideal blend with heat, but it works for now. Someday Jeff would love to build a stainless steel food dehydrator for inside and a solar food dehydrator for outside. In the meantime, we have certainly been getting our money’s worth out of it. I use it to make Crispy Almonds that I turn into Homemade Nut Butter, to dry herbs, and so much more.
Do you like to dehydrate food?
What are your favorite foods to dehydrate?
What preserving methods do you enjoy?
Ooo, are those dried zucchini chips as crunchy as they look? I must try that.
It feels so homey to preserve things like that doesn’t it!
How pretty…
Ooh, dried zucchini – what a great idea! I love my dehydrator, I dry all my herbs that way and until I too get an awesome homemade solar dehydrator contraption, it works great. I did try bananas once, hoping to get crispy banana chips – but they turned into a weird chewy consistency! 🙂
Dried tomatoes are the BEST!
I would love a dehydrator!
A beautiful harvest preserved for the colder months to come. Lovely.
Much love
thank you for the zuuchini reminder! i will need this for this year… bumper crop! lol.
i just dried my first batch of blueberries as well- amazing how much they shrink! i want to try soaking the dried ones and see how they are that way. did you freeze them before drying? that’s what i did, and was the advice from the blueberry farmers where i picked mine, and it seemed to be a good tip. (though i haven’t tried them straight from the bush into the dryer.)
i dry enormous quantities of apple rings every year- love them for treats and trail mix making. i also do up a lot of fruit leather, which is nice because i use up a lot of less-than-choice fruits that way. i’m going to take a stab at drying some tomatoes this year for the first time, that is, if i get an oversupply of cherry tomatoes, which i’m hoping for!
Any easy, solar energy way to dry stuff is to spread it thin on a baking sheet and pop in it the CAR on a hot day with the windows up! I’ve dried many an herb this way! It also works great to have fruit/berry puree and spread that thin in the morning…..by the afternoon you have fruit leather! YUM!
i’ve been wanting to try drying blueberries!
i have a drying rack that i hang my herbs from (and smaller things that can’t hang go on a screen on top)
we also have a cheap plastic dehydrator that we got from either craigslist or freecycle… it doesn’t have an adjustable temp so is too warm for herbs, but we have dried apples, zucchini, tomatoes, and numerous other things that way…
funny, the past couple of years i was all excited about drying different foods, mostly to not be dependent on electricity so much (though our dehydrator is electric… sigh…), but this year we’ve kind of forgotten about it! i think it got “put away” somewhere when we were tidying for the wedding…
thanks for the reminder! i think i need to dig it out, get some more blueberries, and try dehydrating them!