Introduction to Dehydrating - Preservation 101

hey you guys this is josh and caroline with homesteading family and welcome to this week's episode of the pantry chat food for thought this week we are going to be talking about the basics of dehydrating food for preservation [Music] all right so today we're going to be talking dehydrating yeah i'm really excited about this because dehydrating is such a great method for getting food on your shelf filling up the pantry and i love having multiple methods of filling the pantry because as you know when harvest season rolls around you might have your canners running and running and running there's only so much you can can in a day so i love having optional methods you know other methods and dehydrating is a great one absolutely and it's just nice to have some variety and there's just uh you know different uses for those foods too i love the dehydrating because i backpack some of that with kids and hunting and that's great and hey you guys we are right in the middle of a series on kind of preservation 101 and taking you through some of the the basics and in a good level of detail of a lot of different preservation methods we've already done canning and fermenting yes this week we're on dehydrating yeah and i think we're covering root cellaring coming up yes and i'm not sure about anything else yet but this is a good fun series so go back and check out the other ones if you haven't seen it and we will dive into dehydrating here in just a second but let's catch up with a little chit chat for a moment how are you there's some stuff going on right now yeah there is there's a lot of stuff going on in the backdrop and uh you know great grandma genie came to live with us about i think about six seven weeks ago six seven weeks ago and if you guys remember she has visited off and on we just uh did a flashback to a video we did with her last year grandma was born in abilene texas during the great depression she lived through the dust bowl 1928 let me tell you it's funny when you start writing 28 on birth dates for people because we're in 20. yeah and 28 from the century ago i mean that's a that's a long life well-lived yeah it really is and she has done a lot anyway she you were saying she's living with us and we had an incident this last week where her hips really started hurting so thankfully we got her into the doctor they took one look at her sent her over to the er because she had pneumonia that she did not even know about she had no clue about so she had pneumonia and two breaks in her pelvis did you guys know that you can have pneumonia severely and you're not coughing you're not wheezing she did have some discomfort that she noted that we were going to look at but she did no signs and so that's just something good to know especially if you're having elderly care that can show i didn't realize that that could be that severe and not have any presentation absolutely no coughing that was surprising it wasn't even like she's like oh i cough here and there so anyways that has caused both of us i mean there's there's two trips a day right now down to the hospital which is about half an hour away we're so blessed to have a wonderful local small hospital yeah yeah but just very good treatment very good people yeah yeah and uh very very thankful for them yeah it is and we'll be you know looking at giving her some extra care when she gets home and so you know there's a really i think it's a really good season to be thinking about caring for people who are ill or recovering at home we used to have to do this all the time in past centuries before the hospital and the nursing homes were so prevalent we used to just make a practice of being prepared to care for ill and elderly people at home we've kind of lost that knowledge i find it fascinating when i go through cookbooks or home books from the 1600s 1700s whole sections of the book are dedicated to what to feed invalids people who are ill and can't eat normal foods i find that interesting because you sure don't turn to our modern cookbooks you know kind of like your better homes and gardens covers everything cookbook and have a special diet for ill people section wow you know it was just standard and so it's an interesting look at when we bring the family back together you know we start doing things more home-based their skills that we still have to learn how to care for people well absolutely and they're i'm we're thankful for this opportunity to have with her and also just to be building generational living because it's something we want to encourage and we're seeing more and more people come together as families as times get harder as economics are challenging more and more families are coming back to that model of banding together through the generations and um there's a lot of blessing and benefit there's also a lot of challenge and difficulty in that in in caring for people and working through life together and sharing life and but it's it's really really exciting i want to say before we move on that she is because you all are going to be thinking she is doing much better she's very rough but she's recovering very well the hospital's taking great care of her she is just a trooper ready to go we've all been joking that the physical therapy's been getting her out walking and she's getting hard to keep up with yeah she just about wants to get out there and run so she's just got a real passion for life and that's why she's done so well there's so many things because she just loves to live she is very hardy she just bounces back and she was in the hospital singing the other day and just having a blast with a man who came through with a guitar singing hymns she just thought that was the most wonderful thing and so here she is so sick with pneumonia and singing as best she can in the hospital and you know her love of life is just amazing and contagious yes exactly infectious and contagious yeah in a good way right of course all righty well that's i guess kind of consume both of our times along with harvest season and getting ready for winter and all the other stuff that we're doing on the homestead but that's been at the top of our minds obviously and a little putting a little pressure on to get the other stuff done but yeah it's okay we're doing it at the top of that right now is fruit harvest is really happening and we the plums are just going crazy we made tons of plum jam we've made prunes we have a great italian prune tree it's young but it's really getting going this year so we're dehydrating a lot of prunes but then i gotta say finally finally years into my homesteading journey i have finally perfected fruit weather it has taken a long time you know the basic directions out there are something like make a smoothie essentially out of your fruit sweeten it and then put it on your dehydrator trays and i have just never really been happy with the result it's not what i want it to be and so finally this year i dug in and i actually did some research and i figured it out and we're talking about dehydrating today so i'm going to be sharing my specialty with you all the way at the end on how to make grapefruit leather cool i love the fruit leather great great snacks hits the sweet tooth real well and it's healthy and it's great to take out working on the homestead or hiking or backpacking you're going to love it even more good good you're gonna have to fill my pack up because we've got several hunters this year we're gonna be out there this fall sounds good all righty well good job on that and i guess let's uh jump into a question yeah that sounds good for today and let's see here um we'll ask one here from on your cover in this one okay from a cauli on preservation 101 and intro to canning okay okay carol and i water bath can some guava pineapple jam wow that sounds good and that's my commentary and all was fine until i noticed one jar grew mold and popped open and one of the other jars were popped up too what could have gone wrong this has now scared me to can okay that's a really good question and you know i can't tell you exactly what went wrong because i can't sit here and ask you questions and work through this but there are a few things that you need to consider and that could have gone wrong number one did you use an approved recipe that's something or on a precipi a recipe using you know the latest safe methods you can do a little bit of recipe creation in canning as long as you're using the very very safe methods um that's the first thing to consider second thing that i would guess happen assuming that you were using correct methods so you actually did a water boiling water bath canning on that you didn't just open kettle it you know and turn it upside down on the counter or something like that but assuming you actually canned it in a boiling water bath was your head space correct because if your head space was not correct that's that air space at the top of the jar that the space between the top of the food and the lid inside your jar if that's not correct it can cause you not to get a proper vacuum seal in your jar the other thing to check is did your jars have any nicks in the rim um having a a failed jam is not nearly nearly as dangerous as having vegetables or some low acid food fails botulism cannot live in that high acid environment of a jam of fruits like that so that's why using that approved recipe is so important because if you know it's high acid then you've got some mold it's not like it was deadly you know you don't want somebody who has a compromised immune system consuming anything like that but there wasn't going to be botulism in that so you can take a deep breath and not worry so much because that is that high acid food but my guess is going to be that your head space was incorrect on that so double check that next time very cool thanks for that question hey cauli okay all right well let's dive in as usual we've got a lot to cover and we're talking about dehydrating today and i guess let's start with the obvious to make sure we've covered our bases what is dehydrating yeah i think most of us kind of got to get an idea of that but but what is it yeah dehydrating is removing the liquid from a food so that your bacteria and your mold can not grow in that food your spoiling agents need liquid in order to be able to survive in most cases and so by removing that liquid you are removing what they need in order to survive so this is why you don't have mold growing on dry surfaces right you need wet surfaces right so you're allowing an environment where that food can just become shelf stable by removing that liquid cool and that is a very very old we didn't pull history on this but dehydration oh this is ancient this is an old problem way way before canning or anything like that i mean canning history is kind of interesting but it is a very short lifespan compared to something like fermenting or dehydrating well and the reality is is dehydrating is so natural it's going to happen in nature you know you leave that plum on the tree you're going to go out in another month or two and you're going to have a prune on the tree it may not be in great condition because it might have heated and cooled and everything but it's going to dry all by itself in nature so it's a very very natural process cool and i imagine we'll probably talk about this but it it's going to do a little better at preserving the nutrient in the food good and if you do it right cool okay all right so um why would somebody dehydrate what are the you know some of the benefits or reasons to dehydrate over some other preservation methods okay some of the benefits are one it preserves your food that that's kind of the obvious benefit two it's really a good way to make convenience foods especially convenient snacks things like fruit leathers you know vegetable chips fruit chips things like that make a great snack another is that it's very very light weight so for things like backpacking you're talking about you know when you go out hunting or something you can create very lightweight food for it versus taking you know a can of soup you can take along the dried ingredients and just kind of have an instant meal that you can prepare and you know a lot of people automatically for that situation think freeze-dried foods which are great and awesome but um and this is something we're going to cover in the future but freeze drying is expensive to get into the units are just expensive and of course buying it is expensive right so dehydrating is actually a great uh backup to that and we've gone out backpacking where i've dehydrated all my spaghetti meals and scrambled eggs and bacon and all kinds of stuff and it's not quite as good it doesn't come out quite as good as free trade food but it's very good and it's your own and it's not expensive so that's what's really cool is you can have some good quality meals while you're out on those kinds of trips and it's it's very very inexpensive yeah it is the other really good thing about um about dehydrating is that it takes something that's very large and it makes it really small so not just lightweight but small but so a lot of you guys write us and say we're in a small apartment we don't have a lot of storage for canned goods what can we do dehydrating is your friend it takes the bulk way down on things so that's another real good reason to dehydrate and your some of your best dehydrators are not that big either right they don't take a lot of space in your house if you're in a small house yeah okay so let's just cover for a minute um what what are some of the things what are the types of foods that can be dehydrated okay the the range is huge things that you can dehydrate at home is absolutely giant you can dehydrate herbs that's pretty natural to us we think of dehydrated herbs because that's how we usually use them from the store anyways but greens your greens you can dehydrate them we make a super greens powder out of that like we dehydrate them blend them up and then we have a powder of our own video on that we have a video on that drop that in the description of course you have fruits you have vegetables you have meats then you have some kind of surprising things like yogurts dehydrate yogurt yeah you can make nice little snacks i used to do that for the babies you might not remind remember that but just dehydrate little yogurt dollops it's great little dissolvable yep broths now that's that's interesting i mean i know i remember a little the bullion bullion cubes that my mom used to use and my grandma which would be dehydrated broth right and and you'd do it in a powder more probably for home use you can actually even do it in a really thick paste powder or paste um and that's one i haven't gotten into as much as i want i hope to really experiment with that this winter because that would be a great way to do a big batch and then have like your instant soup do you think that's like the benefits to that because i know you can a lot of broth so in the winter time you can add that to rice quick chicken soup whatever right um you can a lot what do you think would be like would there be a benefit to dehydrating or canning the bra well one especially if you want to take it somewhere so if you want to go out and have a vegetable soup you know while you're out hunting yeah it's not just water to have that in the package the other thing is just that is that the space saving of it because you can dehydrate a whole you know a little bouillon cube this big or about this much of a bouillon powder is going to take care of about a quart of liquid so instead of that quart size jar you got something about that size cool so size is a really big deal what about now i'm sorry and this is just a question we hadn't talked about but nutritional value because we know that dehydrating can actually keep a little better nutritional value than say canning and broth is a highly nutritious nutrient-dense food are you going to retain the nutritional disease in some ways you actually retain it better because when you're canning things like broth you often break down the collagen that's why it doesn't thicken anymore when say you have that broth you made and it's in the refrigerator and it's so thick it's like gelatin almost when you go to canna it breaks down the collagen that is not necessarily true and dehydrating you actually keep your collagen in shape still in most cases again it has to do with properly dehydrating it we're going to get into that you can also dehydrate things like cooked eggs not raw eggs but cooked eggs like your scrambled eggs you've taken places you know i use the dehydrator most for sprouted grains and a lot of seasons out of the year we sprout our wheat dehydrate it so we can grind it into a sprouted wheat flour so that's really handy you can dehydrate things like noodles or cooked rice so that you have instant noodles or rice wow so lasagna noodles anybody you can cook them then dehydrate them and then they're instant lasagna noodles which is really handy so you don't have to pre-boil very cool okay okay so what are some things that in our household which you taught you just started to touch on this but what are some things that we like to dehydrate a lot that's useful just for our home because you know every home is different yeah there's all the stuff you can do but you're going to find yourself doing certain things right that are just applicable to our environment or that we enjoy right so what what is it what are some of the things that you dehydrate and why specifically you know okay and you just explained like the sprouted wheat yeah so i just talked about the sprouted wii another one that i'm starting to do i got to tell you guys i know this goes against a lot of homesteaders like lifestyle ideas i've just about stopped canning tomatoes all together because between fermenting tomatoes and dehydrating them i can't figure out why i need them canned in the first place and canning's a lot more work i love the dehydrated tomatoes they are so quick and easy to make a sauce from now you can see it yeah i actually have a gallon jar sitting back here because we just are finishing our tomato season and again the you can fill up a whole lot of jars especially for our family and take up a lot of shelf space for the enough tomatoes that to get us through the winter yeah where is dehydrated i can put that is like half a bushel of tomatoes in that gallon sized jar and it's going to rehydrate to that too and so i really like that of course apples we gotta have apples then the fruit leather now even more fruit leather we're gonna be doing a lot of fruit leather we've got a lot of people dreaming of different flavors of fruit letter that tip is coming at the end hash browns is another one that i really like um amish breakfast casserole is really popular a lot of you guys have enjoyed that recipe that's one of my favorites i'll give you the link in the description to that recipe um but that requires hash browns and i don't usually want to make the hash browns from scratch so i like doing a big batch of dehydrated hash browns it makes it super easy to use prunes of course our super greens powder and then we are always doing herbs yeah always yeah lots of use there okay well what are some things to stay away from that should not or cannot be dehydrated okay so you have milk really can't be safely dehydrated at home in a dehydration unit it can be freeze-dried but that's not that's different right we've got to differentiate those two um let's see fatty and oily foods cannot be dehydrated at home and raw eggs are highly discouraged to be dehydrated at home all because well the milk and the eggs they can go bad faster than they can have spoilage faster than you can dehydrate them the fatty and oily foods and that includes fat in foods so things like your jerky or your meats that's why you want to take the fat off of them is because they can go rancid and of course rancid oils we know are carcinogenic no question about that so you don't really want to be eating those yeah cool okay all righty well so um i mean i feel like we're kind of covering this next part a little bit but there's some there's some more to go into here so let's just talk about pros and cons okay what are the major pros the advantages and reasons why you want to dehydrate okay the biggest pro is because it's actually really easy very few foods need much prep before you get them onto the dehydrator trays except for slicing right yeah absolutely let me just say your food processor with a slicer on it is your best friend for this just run it through it's all uniform really easy the other thing is it's actually really healthy so many things don't need any additives at all they don't need sugar to store well and so it's a great way to get really really healthy snacks in it's also you know it's hard to find healthy snacks that don't need immediate preparation that aren't sweet i found especially that kids will like right but you know things like kale chips carrot chips there are a lot of options um in dehydrating for snacks and that one is a little sweet but yeah but it is a healthy version of sweet but it's healthy yeah it's sweet but it's a healthy sweet it's not it is there any sugar in that i put some sugar in here we're gonna dial this in okay all right so um light it's light space saving we already talked about that the storage is really really great and of course it's energy efficient even running a electric electric dehydrator the excalibur on it that i have their user manual says that it costs between three and six cents an hour to run that is very cheap compared to say running your canner or pressure can it's very cheap definitely compared to like a freeze dryer so that's you know that's really good deal right yeah sure is good and we'll talk about a few different methods of dehydrating as well so you don't have to do electric i mean if you're trying to do scale get things done you're going to want to but there's there's other ways to do it right um but first okay so what are what are some of the cons what are some of the you know detriments to dehydrating or reasons or situations where you wouldn't want to dehydrate okay so first of all especially if you're using that electric uh dehydrator you do you're limited to the amount of tray space that you have at the time and they're not real big unless you're going to go commercial really expensive yeah you can get like full walls for electric ones for electric and that's going to be just crazy expensive but for most home models i have two nine tray excaliburs for our family and a lot of times they are full during harvest season running all the time so you know you have to be aware that you have limited amount that you can process in say a 12-hour window of course you need to have the right setup whatever that is you need to have either your electric uh dehydrator or a different setup we're going to be talking about different options in a second create a warm dry environment that circulates air exactly one way or the other yeah very good um and then for some things it changes the flavor yeah i can't stand the taste of any carrot that has ever been dehydrated i just i don't like that flavor green beans are notorious for changing flavor so there are some things that really the flavor changes drastically even when it's been reconstituted so and reconstituting is the process of getting it wet again so it's a little plumper more like fresh right and then the last one is that the texture changes sure even when it's reconstituted generally your texture is going to be a little different even the scrambled eggs right yeah the scramble is like some things are better than others like some of the stews the spaghetti some of those dinner meals all came out pretty good you know they they can't they came back i mean they weren't like original texture but they come back pretty good the eggs definitely you know you get by you need that fresh trout to mix in with the eggs to make it possible yeah yeah it's very helpful if you're on a lake yeah so it does change the texture and it can change the flavor but you'll find what you like you're trying different things that's why we all have our go-to's and our things because you'll find the stuff that works for you and stuff that doesn't yeah for you absolutely yeah pass on that yeah alrighty well so there's a bunch of different ways to dehydrate we're talking mostly electric here and there's reason for that but but that's not your only option when it comes to dehydrating right let's talk a little bit i mean let's start with electric since we've been out just the electric dehydrator yeah so you have different grades of electric dehydrator if you're looking at buying an electric dehydrator i really recommend you find one with a thermostat so you can choose your temperature that really gets you a better product in the end and a fan so that it circulates the air all the way believe it or not some don't have a fan they just rely on heat and that's that's really not as effective and it causes a lot more work on your side so again i use an excalibur i've loved it i've had mine for 15 years 16. oh um it just feels like it's about as long as i can use it as all the time and have for all those years and never once had a problem with it so i'm just sold on them because it's been such a solid unit for us um but there you know like you said there are other situations that you can create that are going to drive food if you live in a dry environment you can just dry food out on your shelf in some cases well and so the age-old is solar i mean that is probably the original right you know way to dehydrate and and you can make that as simple as what you're saying and just setting things out you know in the sun and warming them to solar you know dehydrators that that um control air flow and monitor temperature yeah and you can definitely do that it is important to note that though that if it's sitting in the direct sun you are going to be losing nutrients right so a lot of times even in solar dehydration you know your best option is if you're in a warm environment and you can dry in the shade but it has to be dry enough in a really humid environment you can have a really hard time getting things dry enough that can be a real challenge and so another option would be in the oven with just a pilot light on or just your light bulb on um you know there are actually some of the new ovens right now i know have a dehydrate setting on them so that it's low enough especially convection ovens will run the fan with just a very very low heat and that can be really nice so you can just dehydrate on your cookie sheets in the oven if you have that yep absolutely and then lastly i mean there's probably some other ones maybe we're not thinking of these are the main ones is just hang drying simple right hang drying which is for herbs particularly is one of the bigger screens yeah absolutely where you're just hanging them from the ceiling again you want them in a dark environment that's warm and has a lot of air circulation so that you're not getting that stagnated air where you're going to cause mold right because that's kind of your big enemy is the mold right so there are a lot of things that you can do without an actual dehydrator electric dehydrator sure yeah very cool all right so let's just cover some of the basics here just the basic steps dehydrating what do folks need to know okay so no matter what method you're using right there are some basics that you need to know they're easier to deal with with an electric dehydrator if you don't have one this information's gonna be really helpful right yeah exactly okay so step number one when you're dehydrating food is choose what food you're going to dehydrate but you have to know nothing is going to get better when it's preserved than when you buy it except for maybe something you're fermenting then maybe but in the case of something that's dehydrated you you want to have great food that you're starting with it needs to be as perfectly ripe as you want it to be to eat it it needs to be non-molded non-bruised all of those things because it's not going to get any better when you dehydrate it right and that's really important because a lot of people go to the grocery store and old bananas are on sale and you know you bring them home and you want to dehydrate all of them just know they're still going to be old bananas when they hit that dehydrator they're not going to get any better flavor right you better know you like the flavor absolutely i like them almost green myself yeah we're all different so yeah yeah have it where you want absolutely that's really important to say that um number two is some items do need pre-treatment and obviously we're not going to sit here right now and say if you're dehydrating apples this is what you need to do so the best thing to do is get yourself a really good dehydrator book that's going to tell you exactly how to treat each item that you want to dehydrate this is the book that i have used it's called mary belle's complete dehydrator cookbook i have like five different dehydrator cookbooks and this is the one i come back to all the time it has been a great book and i highly recommend it um so we'll put the link to it in the description for you guys but um but i would recommend getting a book so you know exactly what to do to each thing some things you need to blanch first especially with vegetables the general rule of thumb is that if you would cook it before you would eat it say like potatoes you don't eat potatoes raw right then you need to blanch it before you dehydrate it the other thing is that some fruits are going to do better if they have the acid treatment to keep them from getting brown because they're going to be sitting out for quite a while in the dehydration process so just know what you need to do to each thing okay ready cool okay number three is to get them sliced or cut or put into some sort of a uniform shape so that they're all the same thickness so they dry it approximately the same way right if you get if you get a whole bunch of variation there you're going to get some things that are going to over dry and then some things aren't going to dry enough exactly so you want to get them into that uniform size get them onto whatever your tray is hopefully spaced out so they have some airflow next is if you're using an electric dehydrator with a thermostat set it to the correct temperature and this is really important to get your best nutrient value out of your foods if you're talking herbs we want to be about 115 degrees fahrenheit for greens and veggies you're at about 125 degrees for fruits 135 degrees and for jerkies you really need to be up at 165 degrees for meats or anything like that right so that's going to get you even if you're using a dehydrator with a fan you're going to want to rotate your trays occasionally i find that that just gives you the best results in the long run and depending on what you're dehydrating you may want to actually flip the vegetables fruits or the item over on your tray sometimes what like can you give us an example of that yeah sometimes like right now i'm doing a lot of plums or prunes and so you start them out with the skin side down so that it lets off moisture but at some point that can end up because the wrinkling holding in moisture in those wrinkles it's like a little bowl so you want to flip it over so that you get that it's not always necessary but usually you can get a better product yeah yeah so that was step number five number six this is where that book comes back in make sure you know the desired consistency or texture of the finished product that you're looking for some things need to be crispy to be dried properly to store for a long time some things need to be leathery so you need to know your your finished goal and then be checking your food make sure when you check food in the dehydrator you take it out of the dehydrator let it cool to room temperature before you check it because that heat adds pliability yeah so you gotta see what it's really like what exactly see how it's gonna adjust and then last is to store it once you get it done obviously you're not going to leave it sitting out in the sun you don't want to leave it hanging from your ceiling in the case of an herb you want to get it into an airtight container some people use moisture absorbers just to be sure desiccants just to be sure they didn't leave any moisture in there what i like to do is i just put it in check it after a day make sure there's no condensation on the inside of the jar to be sure i got it all the way dry in which case i know it's good to sit on the shelf so that's good and it's good check well that's nice that's a nice little hack right there to avoid the you know how the descents are just another thing to buy yeah throw away take care of so that's a nice solution yeah you don't really need to do that so right on so that's a good just overview yeah and how to dehydrate yeah and um so now we get on to using some of those foods so of course you can use a lot of them raw and in their dehydrated form you know for example the fruit leathers or the the chips or the jerky but what we seem to have forgotten in our culture a little bit is that historically a lot of the foods that were dehydrated were reconstituted and then cooked with brought back yeah absolutely so the way you generally do that let's say you've dehydrated some spinach you want to use it in a winter soup you're going to get that into lukewarm or room temperature water generally for about 30 minutes before you want to add it to something hot or cook with it and reconstitute that reconstituting times can be anywhere from about 30 minutes to about two hours but you don't want to just take your food with the exception of herbs you don't want to just take your dried food and dump it into your boiling soup yeah that will not allow it to reconstitute properly so you need to do it in cool lukewarm room temperature water first so give us a tip i know you're going to have one here right at the end on the fruit leathers but give us a tip on tomatoes because that's when you're you're you're finding yourself using more and more dehydrated you use tomatoes and a lot so that's when i think that you you often dehydrate i'm sorry rehydrate yeah right like you're talking about so give us a couple tips on that because i think people are going to like that idea that they can dehydrate tomatoes but that's definitely one that you're going to want to dehydrate rehydrate they actually taste really good as tomato chips but when you want to reconstitute them and this is such a good thing when we're running out of canning lids they're hard to get right now canning supplies this is a really good alternate way to get your tomatoes in i like to toss them with salt and italian seasoning before i dehydrate them dehydrate them in slices and then when i'm ready to use them i just take a good handful of them and i personally if i'm going to make a sauce i stick them right in my blender and pour room temperature water over them and let them sit there for about 10 minutes to 30 minutes then i just turn the blender on it makes a great sauce you can add more or less water depending on if you're looking for a thick sauce a thinner sauce you can season it differently you can add all sorts of things usually you add a little bit of honey or something if you want to make a pizza sauce out of it usually that's a little sweeter you know so it just is so usable and so easy it only takes a few minutes to reconstitute it and just blend it right up in there very cool yeah well that that's a great tip and i hadn't thought about that going into this discussion just we know and a lot of you know out there how difficult it is to get canyon supplies and so what you can do with dehydrating some of these vegetables and maximizing space and use of the supplies that you have so that's a good pivot it is right now in an environment that's a little bit challenging when it comes to preserving uh via canning so yeah very very very good thought um all right so we're about to wrap up here final tip uh final tip that you promised about the best fruit leather this is something you've been making for us for for nearly two decades and i've always been really happy with it okay i didn't know until recently that you weren't liking your recipe because we did have a season where you weren't making a whole lot and i thought it just wasn't working out but i didn't realize that's because you were there was something wasn't working the way you wanted it to and now you've come back to this and you you've got you've got a hack you've got something that changes the game on fruit leathers so tell us about it that is added pectin essentially i make a low sugar jam out of the fruit and with the added pectin and one that pectin's really good for you so it's very healthy for you it's added fiber and stuff but two it thickens it enough that you get this great texture and it's like a store-bought fruit leather which i grew up with the store-bought version as like the ideal treat from the grocery store and so i've had this in my mind for years i've been looking for that and this just did it so my my real trick if you use the pomona's pectin you can multiply that many times over so you don't have to just make a single batch of jam and you can make it very low sugar you don't want a full sugar jam for this because sugar dehydrates really slowly so it'll leave it wet and sticky instead if you have too much sugar in there um but a little bit is going to preserve your color and you do need a little bit to mix in with that pectin you could use honey you could use some other things i haven't experimented with that yet but it makes a nice thick pliable leather that does not over dry and become chips i don't like chips okay so it is a great way to go um and then you just slice it up and put it in some parchment paper for storage in a bag and it's ready to go for you know lunch snacks whatever it is that you need it for us well i'm what i've had so far is great and i'm excited to be able to pull some of these out in the pack this fall yeah and so thanks for that absolutely that's really really good it's been a great hanging with you guys we gotta go and we will see you soon goodbye [Music]

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 101,430

Keywords: Homesteading, Homesteading Family, Food Preservation, how to, preserving food, dehydrating food, how to dehydrate food, food dehydration, food dehydrating, food dehydrating 101, food dehydrating 101 series

Id: B_4Oc-RKt8M

Length: 38min 56sec (2336 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020