who has experience with dehydrating and storing veg and fruits?

[Zonny]

This is all great info! I have a food saver with a jar sealer attachment and piles of mason jars and use it for dry goods in my pantry. I have the regular food saver but it's not been sealing bags lately. I also have a separate thing, same brand, but handheld thing that I use with the jar attachment to seal jars, and it also came with several plastic containers that you can seal, good for marinating things. That came from XS Cargo. I've been thinking of a dehydrator, but not a $500 one.

I went looking for dried fruit the other day, with the idea of making homemade oatmeal packets like the Quaker ones, but without the sugar. Nearly every one I found had sugar, oil and some kind of preservative added to it, I'd love to make just plain old apples. A coworker of mine does apple chips every year, they're crunchy and delicious.

[SassyAshley]

Perfect place to share this, sitting at my desk right now eating dried pineapple I did two months, it has been in a mason jar no packs and is still so yummy.

[walkonby]

Big Pink, thank you for your post. I discovered a fair bit of storage space available for my growing inventory of dehydrated foods in jars without having to lug them up or down any stairs, it is just outside of my kitchen doorway. I had removed the actual door at the top of the landing that leads to my basement this summer while I was painting and it turns out I liked it better just having the doorway. The " alcove " that was formerly behind that door runs floor to ceiling and although there are solid storage cubicles holding dishes and other shelving with preserves I was able to adjust a few things to dedicate a place for these jars. I decided not to use oxygen packs, and I do not have that machine to vacuum seal my jars so I do not plan to keep these dried foods in these jars for more than 1 year, hopefully they will stay good and get used up in that time frame. Both my dehydrating books do encourage us to check the jars regularly for any pieces that look bad ( moldy? ) so I will have to be diligent about that.

[Big Pink]

I've been thinking of a dehydrator, but not a $500 one.

I use a Nesco dehydrator that I bought at an electronics warehouse. I think it was $40 on sale (saw one at a thrift shop the next week, of course!). Similar to this style:
http://www.amazon.ca/FD-37A-400-Watt...co+dehydrators
I don't know if there is a benefit to the more expensive machines??? Mine works fantastic and could be expanded with additional trays if I needed them.

As far as the home made oatmeal... what a great idea for the dried fruit. I buy mine all on discount and it literally could be made with whatever variety of fruit you want... with as much fruit as you want... for a good price. Plus who knows exactly what else is in those oatmeal packets that doesn't get listed? Not long ago I got a couple pounds of seedless grapes for $1.00... and made inexpensive raisins in the dehydrator. Plus they were insanely better than bought raisins.

There also has been mention of dog treats... mine wait by my side when I'm emptying the machine to catch fly-aways. They love pretty much anything... I don't even have to make pet specific ones anymore. The only things I am careful not to spill are the onions.

SassyAshley... I am thinking about getting into powders also... what do you use to make them? A food processor?

[walkonby]

my plan is coming together pretty well. Blue Sky Market had lovely trays of reduced produce this morning that quite honestly looked better than some stores regular stuff! I scored 3 long large trays of clean white mushrooms @ $1.00 ea., 3 trays of green beans also $1.00 ea. and I decided to try one of those 3 lb bags of peeled washed garlic cloves ( messy prep all done )
Right now all I can smell is garlic in here.....hee hee. ( I dedicated one dehydrator today filling all the trays with just garlic )
Now if some stores would kindly mark the celery down to a decent price ( like 79 each! ) instead if $1.79?? then I'd do lots of that up too.

[walkonby]

update on my progress so far!! I now have so many jars filled with crunchy dried bits of produce. The finished products look so weird but oddly lovely to see them all lined up and labelled on the shelf. The beef steak tomato slices are soooo red too. I have put off doing the sweet onions until I have all 15 trays available and I'll be slicing them through the Oster Kitchen Aid attachment to save some time and hopefully avoid all the tears.

[walkonby]

just added to my spice rack, dried more basil and sage last night. I keep clipping the leaves and they keep growing ( plants are out back ). Wonder if I should continue to grow them indoors over the winter? Hmmmm.