home made dehydrator?

[Wildsky]

On the food network they have a show called "Good Eats" with alton brown. He showed how to truly dehydrate. With no heat.
You buy a couple pleated furnace filters (not fiberglass!), and a box fan. You put your meat in the freezer until very very firm. Take it out and slice it diagonally with out handling it to much. Put your salt and spices on. lay the meat strips into the pleats. When you are done grab another filter and stack it on top and repeat with meat. When the meat is all layered and the filters all stacked you finish the stack off with one extra filter.
Hold the stack up to the front of the fan and attach it with bungee cords.
Turn fan on high and aim it outside. In twelve - 24 hrs you will have true jerky (like the eskimoes make lol) this works outside also.
I want to try this when hubby gets a deer, yum.

Sounds like BILTONG - look that up

 

[roosmom]

Yuck, I dont want

ok no matter what way I type this it sounds risque.

Yuck I dont want any hard dried meat. yuck.

 

[keljonma]

For the last two years I used my oven to dry extra sweet corn, fruits and other veggies. It took a long time for the juicy items to get dried out, especially the corn and roma tomatoes.

I have an old (no fan) Ronco dehydrator that I got for $2 at a trash-n-treasure sale this summer. So far I have used it to dry various herbs, fruit and veggies. I also made fruit leather. I also put them in canning jars in the pantry. I noticed that it uses much less energy than my oven. And since I'm not using the oven, it is free for other cooking/baking that needs to be done.

 

[Quail_Antwerp]

What is fruit leather?

 

[Wildsky]

What is fruit leather?

fruit dried in strips - kinda like if you spread apple sauce on a sheet and dried it. Similar to Fruit roll ups.

 

[ChickenTender63]

I use my dehydrator to make beef jerky and fruit roll-ups on occasion. I love the jerky. I always just store mine in ziploc bags when it's done, and eat it as I want it.

Much cheaper than trying to buy it pre-made

 

[pioneergirl]

I tried making some apple 'chips' in the oven the other day...not doing that again.

sliced them thin, put them on a cookie sheet in a 150 oven....they stuck to the sheet and had to be soaked off!! ah well, I need to just get a real dehydrator, lol

 

[sufficientforme]

I bought this book to make one next summer, I think it looks pretty simple to do.
http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Food-Dr...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224734389&sr=8-1

 

[enjoy the ride]

I have friends that used a homemade dehydrator for years- it was made out of plywood with incandenscent bulbs for the heat source and a little fan for air circulation. The shelves wer made of 1x1" wood frames with plastic screening tacked on- you could pull the shelves out. I wonder if you might have trouble one of these days finding incandenscents.

Used to be you could find dehydrators at garage sales everywhere- one of my two is a Golden harvest new in the box for $5 at a garage sale. Works plenty fine. I used to have a very expensive one that was actually recalled due to causing a fire hazard- I got another Golden harvest in exchange. Both have worked for years without any problem but I still will not leave them running when I am not at home- recall thing made me nervous about it.lol

 

[punkin]

I just got my dehydrator a few months ago. So far I have dehydrated blueberries, strawberries, apples, cherries, onions, green peppers, tomatoes, mango and papaya.

The onions, green peppers and tomatoes got crushed to use as an extra seasoning for soups and such. The tomatoes also went into veggie cheese bread.

My DS's favorite was mango.