Dehydrating Basics

welcome to rose-red homestead today we're going to talk about food dehydrating this is an age-old practice for food preservation but it is often confused with freeze drying which is a very much more modern way of preserving food so we're going to basically talk about dehydrating versus freeze drying and then three things that our success in dehydrating at home depends on then we'll talk a little bit about what needs to be done with fruits and vegetables and meats in order to dehydrate them so we will get right to it just as soon as we come back [Music] first of all people have been dehydrating food in order to preserve it for thousands and thousands of years and so it is an age-old practice and one that is very successful one of the caveats related to home dehydrating of food is that it doesn't last as long as some people think it does and so as we prepare to do some food dehydrating I think it's important for us to think about in terms of they here and now it's really a good process but in terms of long-term food storage and I'm talking 15 20 30 years home dehydrating is not the way to go the food just simply does not last that long but with freeze drying it would so let's talk about the difference for just a minute between dehydrating food and freeze drying food and basically the main difference is in how the moisture is removed from the food dehydrating or freeze drying both of those processes remove moisture right out of the food and the reason for that is to prevent the growth of microorganisms and the spoiling the food so how the moisture is removed within a freeze dryer and they now make freeze dryers that you can use at home they're quite expensive they start at about 2000 dollars and go all the way up to about four thousand dollars you may notice that I don't have one and so because we don't have one we either buy freeze-dried food or we just opt to do our food preservation in a different way but the way that it works inside of a freeze dryer is that the food is placed on a tray very similarly to what we would do in a dehydrator and then it is placed in a vacuum chamber where all of the air is removed that's what a vacuum and so all of the air is removed and then the food is lowered to below freezing and then the temperature is raised slowly and as it Ray is raised the moisture inside the food is sublimated which means it does not go through the liquid state it goes directly from whatever state it's in to a gas and then it is dissipated and in that process because of that going directly to a gaseous state the nutrition of the food is preserved to a much greater degree than it is in regular dehydrating and therefore the shelf-life is also much much longer with freeze-dried foods they can last up to 25 to 30 years also in terms of the amount of moisture that is removed with freeze drying you can remove about 98 99 % whereas in regular dehydrating using a machine like this you can remove maybe up to 95% so the shelf-life on home dehydrated food is at about a year now with commercially dehydrated food not freeze-dried but with commercially dehydrated foods they can do a much better and a much more controlled process in the dehydrating process and so dehydrated foods that you purchase from professional warehouses and Kanner's and sources usually can last up to five to ten years I do an awful lot of dehydrating but I do not dehydrate foods and put them on my shelf thinking that they're going to last for five or ten years because they just won't the the nutritional value decreases the color goes away and so pretty soon they're not only unappetizing but they have lost a lot of their nutrition so with freeze-dried foods the nutrition is preserved in dehydrated foods it's preserved for a little while now one thing to remember with both processes is that a lot of the nutrition is preserved except for vitamin C vitamin C is as readily destroyed in any any kind of freeze drying or dehydration and so that is one reason why it is recommended that for long-term storage we keep vitamin C tablets on our shelf on our emergency preparedness shelf so that we can replenish that vitamin C if we have to live through a time where there is difficulty in obtaining fresh foods all right so let's talk just a little bit about the process of dehydrating I'm not going to address freeze drying any further but dehydrating is something that we can do at home and there are three processes that have to happen in order for food to be dehydrated now I have some here that I have dehydrated in the past year these are lemon slices and I quite often will use these lemon slices and to put in soups when I'm counting them this is celery and I certainly do plan to do an entire video devoted to celery this is a really important one for us to dehydrate as our onions and while the wall of sweet onions are coming on in just a few weeks and I have a daughter that lives up in Washington right by Walla Walla and Jim and I are traveling up there in just a few weeks and we're going to come home with some Walla Walla and we'll do a whole video on how to dehydrate those and then these are apples these are actually from our apple trees and these are so yummy we just love these love love love them now the date on this one if you can see is 2016 so these are about three years old but I keep these in my freezer instead of just putting them out on the shelves and so they are preserved much longer in a frozen condition and then off to the side here you can see just some vegetables that I've done here is corn here's mixed veggies and then here are peas and I keep my vacuum sealed in these pint jars and I will do about enough to last us a year and these are the vegetables that I will just throw in the soups and stews that I'm making so that they can rehydrate right within those dishes as they are cooking today is just going to be a discussion of the basics of dehydrating so we're not going to be demonstrating how to do it but at the same time that I published this video I am also going to put up some other videos that show you how to do particular foods so that you can watch this one first if you need to know the basics and then you can go right into the others so dehydrating depends on three things first of all a dehydrator has to provide the right amount of heat that will drive the moisture out of the food but not enough heat that it will cook the food so that's a very delicate balance and that occurs with temperatures between about 125 up to about 150 degrees and if you can keep the temperature within that range then you will have pretty good success now as the moisture is driven out of the food the second thing that has to happen is that there has to be dry air around that will absorb that moisture that is why hydrating outside especially if you live in very humid places like we used to live in Houston and it would never work in Houston because the humidity is too high the there has to be dry enough air to absorb that moisture and then the third thing is there needs to be enough circulation to blow the moisture away so the food will not resorb the moisture now there are a lot of different types of equipment that you can get that will do those things the Sun the will dehydrate food and that is how it has been done for thousands of years and you can go online and find ways that you can set food out on a tray and cover it with cheesecloth or something to keep the bugs off of it and you'll have reasonable success if you live in the desert Southwest for instance you can also be able to do it yourself Solar dehydrator your kid oven is also a possibility provided that your oven will go as low as a hundred 150 degrees many kitchen ovens don't go that low and so what happens is there's a tendency to cook the food instead of dehydrating it the very best option that you will have the most success with in doing home dehydrating is with a commercial dehydrator and these little home dehydrators are really wonderful I have been using one for I imagine 30 years maybe 40 years I've gone through I think about five of them in that timeframe so I've tried different brands and different styles and I don't particularly recommend a particular brand of one I've used a lot of different ones and they all can give satisfactory results so the different types of home dehydrators usually they're coming just pretty much two types there are the round ones and I have had two different versions of the round dehydrators and then there are the Box types so things that you need to consider when if you're going to be purchasing a new dehydrator are there are pros and cons to both styles with the round ones youyou need to have a well with all of them you need to have a heating element and you need to have a fan it's back to those two ideas of having enough heat to drive the moisture out dry air to absorb the moisture and then circulation to get that wet air out of the way so the food doesn't resort that so on the round ones the heating element and the fan are usually on the top and they will blow the air down through a layer of trays or the heat and the fan comes from the bottom and they will blow it up through a series of trays the downside with those is that very often you have to take it apart and rearrange the trays because the tray nearest the heat source will dry the food faster and so you'll need to rotate and put that one on the bottom and mix them around but I've had to do that with this one as well so you know it's not all that big of a deal now with the box ones and this one is a a magic mill and I've had three different brands of box I don't remember my first one it was my very earliest one so it has been years and years ago and I used it for a long long time I just wear them out because I use them so often but with a box fan like this the heating element and the fan come from the back wall and so it is blowing the hot air across all of the trays to the front and here's the little vent for this one right here and and so it is supposedly will give a more balanced circulation of the heat inside the box but as I say I've had to ship these trays around too because there are hotspots in all of them but it is really such a convenience to be able to have a dehydrator available sometimes I over buy bananas they're on sale so I'll grab a bunch and then Jim and I don't eat bananas very much and so they're getting a little bit overripe and so it is so convenient to just peel those bananas slice them up and put them on the trays and then put them in there and we'll have banana chips after a while and so you can look for sales and purchase whatever you might need in season like with the Walla Walla onions and then I will do like a year's supply maybe a little bit more and then the next year when that same food comes on I'll just replace now one thing to consider when you are looking at dehydrators is the shelves generally the shelves are like this these are plastic I think I think this one is about now I think three years old I think the newer models of this one now have stainless shelves which would be very nice but these are these are plastic and they work just fine the holes are a little bit large I could not do peas on this one for instance unless you have an insert and mine came with it has six shelves and it has six inserts and these are much smaller holes so I am able to do foods like peas or minced onions things like that and then mine also came with three trays like this there's a little lip right here and this little insert fits right over the tray like this and it does fruit leather I know that some people really like fruit leather I am NOT a fan of fruit leather but this is how you would do it if you were going to do it you would just spread like apple sauce or pureed whatever recipe you're going to do in this little tray has a little lip that's probably about a quarter of an inch and then the warm air blows across the top and will gradually dry it out in order to do vegetables we'll talk first about vegetables and then fruits and then just a little bit about meat with vegetables of course with all food you'll wash it and prepare it and then you'll cut it slice it or dice it into well I don't know if you can see these apples but these were I think probably about 1/4 inch slices and I have one of those fancy apple pear corer peeler contraptions that that's what I do my apples on and so if you can keep the slices as uniform as possible then you can spread them out but with vegetables here's a very important consideration now when I was doing the research to prepare this dehydrating basics video I went out to see what was available on YouTube and on the internet and blogs and so on and so forth there is so much information out there and some of it is I am sad to say misinformation so may I just urge you to please do your own research I always do research I if I'm going to be giving you my opinion I will identify it as my opinion most of the time when I tell you about processes or other concepts about whatever it is we're talking about it is based on my own research where I have gone out to reliable sources and read thoroughly so that I can make sure that I am NOT giving you any misinformation and my source on dehydrating has been the National Center for food preservation and that is a USDA website it is available just do a google search on National Center for home food preservation and you can learn all kinds of very interesting things there now according to that website almost all vegetables need to be blanched and this is where you will find lots and lots of misinformation out on the Internet some people say you don't need to blanch vegetables well the truth of the matter is you don't have to do anything you don't have to blanch your vegetables but here is the science behind why you may want to consider blanching your vegetables first of all blanching preserves quality and safety now there are some exceptions in vegetables onions for instance they're no longer recommending that you need to blanch onions but pretty much everything else it is recommended that you blanch now maybe I should define blanching in case you don't know what blanching is what it means and I'm going to be demonstrating this on one of my very first videos that I do it means that you will plunge the vegetables into boiling water and you will keep them in boiling water for just a couple three minutes there is a table on the National Center for home food preservation that will tell you about how many minutes you need to blanch these vegetables and then you lift it out and then you will plunge it into cold water to stop the cooking you don't want them cooked you just want them blanched so here's what blanching does number one it preserves the color and the nutrition except for vitamin C which is tough to preserve anything you do number two and here's the really important one is that it stops or slows down enzyme action now when your apples are growing on the tree or the celery is growing out in the garden or whatever those enzyme actions are really important because that's what brings the food up to the ripe State but sadly enzymes don't know when to quit and so they just keep doing their action even after you've picked things and brought them in so they will continue to ripen and ripen and pretty soon things are getting spoiled and rotting and so you need to stop enzyme action or slow it down a lot and if you don't blanch just dehydrating them often does not stop that enzyme action so we want to slow or stop enzyme action now the third thing that it is important to consider blanching for is that it relaxes the tissues and I thought that that was really kind of a strange way to put it it's like sometimes they think we can't handle the real science behind things what does that mean well here it is here's the straight science scoop so you may remember from your high school biology class that plant cells and animal cells have different cell walls plant cells have cellulose walls that cellulose is pretty tough stuff it's what helps plants stand erect they don't have a backbone like we do if we didn't have a backbone we'd be a puddle on the floor but with plants that cell wall that surrounds every single cell is like a building block and it makes things rigid and it's tough material and so what you want to do is you want to heat it up so that that cellulose is relaxed and what happens then is that when we do the dehydrating when once that cellulose cell wall relaxes the moisture can get out much easier and our drying time our dehydrating time is reduced but there's a flipside to later on when we want to rehydrate that food for whatever reason and we put it in a bowl of water to rehydrate because the cell you is now relaxed water can get in more quickly and do a much more thorough job of rehydrating case in point is with celery celery if you don't hydrate celery it will it's rare that it will soften enough because we have dried out that cellulose and made it so tough that it's it is difficult for water to get back in so one of the first videos I'm going to do is about celery and I'll show you how I blanch it and then the last thing is that of course when we're plunging things in boiling water it is going to help eradicate the harmful bacteria that may be on the surface of the vegetables so that's what we'll want to do and then when we get into the other videos I'll show you precisely how to do different processes for different vegetables so we'll we'll save that for individual videos now in terms of fruits we also want to wash those fruits and then slice them these lemons I hand sliced and I tried to get them as I don't have one of those fancy slicer machines which I think are very cool I should probably get one it's just you know I've been doing it this way for 50 years so I just probably keep on doing it but slice them as uniform as possible and then they will dry better now fruits do not need to be blanched per se but if you're going to do peaches you may want to plunge them in boiling water for just long enough so that you can slip the skins off same thing with tomatoes and technically tomatoes are a fruit although I know we classify them with vegetables but if we want to slip the skins on tomatoes we can do the same thing with apples you don't even have to peel them I have this little piece of equipment that does peel them at the same time and it slices them so I just do that but I have seen apples with a little rim of skin around and they work just fine so we don't have to blanch but we have to maybe peel a banana certainly has to be peeled with pears and apples they should be cored Paris I think should be peeled and we'll get into the details of individual in separate videos as we go one of the things that with fruits we want to consider is whether or not to stop the oxidation the same thing actually with potatoes some fruits and vegetables will turn brown when exposed to oxygen and so apples and pears are both susceptible to oxidation and so we can dip them in s korvac acid water about 1/4 of a teaspoon of ascorbic acid in a quart of water or we can spritz them with lemon juice any high acid thing or other fruit juice we could spritz them with now a little bit of oxidation doesn't bother me and so when I do apples I don't even bother to do any oxidation preventive with apples or pears for that matter but if it does bother you then by all means just dip it in some ascorbic acid water or just spritz it with some lemon juice and that will be fine and then the other thing that has to happen with fruits is that very often they need to be what is called conditioned now conditioning with fruits it is sometimes harder to get the innermost parts of fruit completely devoid of the water we want to remove all about 90 to 95% of the water if we can and sometimes that is a little bit difficult and so we can squish the fruit down and it's it's still squishy rather than being liked with these apples these I know are completely dry because I can break them and they snap and if they were still with moisture in the middle of course these are three years old so moisture has gone here and and so they need to be completely without water but with conditioning what we want to do is to evenly distribute any remaining moisture and so we put fruits in a tight jar with a lid and then we leave it for a week to ten days and we can shake the fruit up and just watch it look at it every day and if any didn't say ssin appears on the inside of that jar then they need to go back in the dehydrator for a little bit more time to drive the rest of that moisture out because we do not want to take any chances and put fruits away sealed up in bags or anything if there's still moisture left in them now in terms of meat I prefer to do pressure canning of meat but I do love to make jerky it's sort of a family tradition of ours at Christmas time to make jerky and that's what I give already used to I don't do it so much anymore I finally gave all of my six children a dehydrator for Christmas about I don't know ten years ago or so so all six of them had a dehydrator at one I don't know if they still have them or not you know and I gave them the recipe so that they could start making their own meat jerky and I'll do the jerky recipe in a video as well but you can dehydrate meat as well you just have to be very very careful and make sure that the moisture is driven out to the extent that it will not spoil and it is better to store any meat that you do in a home to hydrator like either in a refrigerator or else in a freezer so I just I really don't do a lot of meat except for jerky and again it just needs to be sliced and about 1/4 of an inch thick and then it needs to be dried until it's leathery and so that those are really the basics of dehydrating and we will spend some time now in doing some other videos that we will be posting probably throughout the summer and early fall up until the apples ripen in October we'll be putting out more and more videos on food dehydrating so I hope that this has been helpful to you and thank you so much for joining us and we will see you next time [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 61,233

Rating: 4.9583135 out of 5

Keywords: dehydrating food, dehydrating fruits, dehydrating vegetables, blanching vegetables, how to blanch, dehydrating vs freeze drying, freeze drying, short term food storage, dehydrators, dehydrating equipment

Id: m1K2mbk8WZo

Length: 27min 22sec (1642 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019