There are many different ways to preserve food. Out preferred one is dehydration – the process of removing moisture from food products. This way of food preservation was discovered by ancient civilizations, who developed the early systems for drying foods that we still use today. We want to share our experience on how to dehydrate different types of food and where to use it.
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Drying food may seem complicated or unsafe to those unfamiliar with dehydrators. But compared to canning or freezing, drying food is easier. Dried produce doesn’t need to be stored in a freezer, which saves electricity and valuable freezer space and it stays good for just about forever!
Last summer we gathered our desirable food products and tried to preserve them till winter. And we made it! Now in a wintertime, we can season stews with our picked mushrooms or enjoy berries with homemade granola and yogur.
Follow our advice and you can get ready for winter or make super powders and dried foods for hiking trips in a few simple steps.
3 ways to dry food
For the dehydration process, you can use an electrical dehydrator, a sun dryer or an oven. We don’t use the latter one – dehydrating food, especially leafy greens in an oven, affects its taste and destroys all the healthy micronutrients.
Second option, which we enjoyed the most was a sun drying method. Justinas made a huge sun dryer himself and we used it to dry most of our goods. Of course, it has some cons. For example, if there are not enough sunny days in the summer, you can’t really use it. It’s also not manufactured anywhere (or I haven’t seen one), so you’ll have to make it yourself if you want to dry your harvest this way.
The third option is to use an electrical dehydrator, which I find the easiest one. You don’t have to wait for sunny days or look after it carefully so the food wouldn’t burn like in the oven. You can simply put your food and leave it! It’s that simple. But it still uses electricity, so the sun dryer is a lot more eco-friendly.
What can you dry from your garden?
So now when you know all the dehydration options you can choose the most suitable for you and start to dehydrate your food. You can dry out anything from your garden: berries, fruits, mushrooms, vegetables and leafy greens.
The dehydration process is slightly different with different food, but it’s easy to master.
1. Berries
Depending on the size of the berry, you might need to cut it in half. For example, we dehydrated whole blueberries and it worked out fine, while we needed to cut strawberries in 4 pieces. Both of the berries took about 2 days in the electrical dehydrator to be completely done. Despite the different size, blueberries had more moisture than strawberries. That’s why they required more time to be completely dry.
You should keep an eye on how moist your products are. Depending on this factor, you might need to use a different setting on your dehydrator. Also, check your berries before removing them from the dehydrator – while for the outside they might look dry, their insides might still be moist.
2. Fruits
We dried apples, tomatoes (yes, it’s a fruit!) and quince which we call the Lithuanian lemon. The apples are very easy to dry, so if you don’t have much experience with dehydratation, apple is the perfect fruit to start with. You just peel them, remove the seeds and slice into even pieces. It usually takes no longer than a day (aprox. 12 hours) to dry apples with the dehydrator.
Quince fruits are a different thing. They are so sour that we couldn’t dry it without sugar! While we like to dry food ourselves, because there is no added sugar in it, it doesn’t apply to quince.
We removed the seeds, sliced it, put it in a big bowl, and covered with sugar. You should leave it for twenty-four hours to let the syrup dissolve. Then strain the quince slices and put it on a baking tray. Bake on the lowest possible temperature (preferably 50°C ) from 12 to 16 hours.
Drying tomatoes really depend on the breed of tomato you will choose. Some tomatoes are perfect for canning, but are horrible them for drying, because they are extra juicy. So choose wisely and you will have less trouble drying them
We used our fully ripe garden tomatoes. The bigger the tomato – the more you have to slice it up. So some of them might have to be cut in 6 pieces, while baby tomatoes can be dehydrated whole. We thought we will make big batches of sun dried tomatoes, but we weren’t that lucky. The weather was really rainy las summer and we managed to dry only a small amount of our garden tomatoes. But hey, they tasted like heaven so it’s better than nothing!
3. Mushrooms
First of all, if you will use wild mushrooms, always be sure what you picked before consuming them. Depending on their shape, you can cut them in half and use the lowest setting in the electric dehydrator to save beneficial compounds.
Mushrooms should be cracker dry, meaning they snap easily and break apart like a dry cracker. If they still seem moist or bend rather than snap, it’s best to keep drying. Mushrooms that still contain some moisture may rot or develop mold.
Drying mushrooms, I would say, is the hardest option of food to dry. They need a lot of time to dry evenly and different mushrooms may dry faster than others. It takes days for Justinas mother to dry mushrooms and she is an expert in it.
4. Leafy Greens
Kale is one of the easiest vegetables to dry for winter. Did you know that dried kale and kale powder are the new superfood? You can of course by it, but it can be quite pricey.
We grew a lot of kale last summer, so drying it was easy and cheap.
We did all of the “chopping” work outside – we simply teared up kale leaves into the fine ribbons with our hands. But remember you have to remove the heavy central rib, because it’s fibrous and heavy to dry. Then we placed our kale pieces on sun dryer tray and waited until they got crisp and crumbly.
Kale dries fast – usually, it takes around 6 to 8 hours, if the weather isn’t too humid and cloudy. If there is any limpness at all, dry it a little longer before storage.
If you don’t have a sun dryer or dehydrator yet, you can do this in your oven. You can make kale chips to snack on, but as I said it would lose most of the it’s minerals. And if you want to do large batches and have a winter supply you really need to get a dehydrator
The next step you can make is to powder your dried kale. It’s perfect for morning smoothies or soups! We also dried some wild nettle, because of its particular health qualities.
Store dehydrated goods
Store food in glass jars with tight fitting lids. It’s also useful to add a silica gel package to some products jars like strawberries to prevent moisture in it.
When dried and properly stored, dehydrated food is ready any time to be used in your food. It’s good for smoothies, stews, soups and everything you can think of!
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, we will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase after clicking through the link.
Thoughts by Eisve Treciakauskaite
Words by Laura Želvytė
Photos by Justinas Lekavicius
