Dehydrating Zucchini in 5 Different Ways | Chips, Jerky, Shreds, Dices, Flour

it's that time of year folks it's zucchini season for those of you who don't like zucchini lock your doors turn off all your lights on your porch or put all your security cameras on so you know which neighbor is dropping off zucchini on your doorstep that you don't want otherwise stay tuned i'm going to show you four ways to dehydrate and use zucchini that will make you have zucchini last all year long and you won't have to start dumping this stuff at your neighbor's house your navels will thank you really they will we're going to be doing zucchini jerky zucchini chips zucchini powder shredded zucchini dicey zucchini all the ways that you can use zucchini and not have to drop off stuff to your neighbors ever again okay i've got my zucchini soaking in some baking soda and water not because i think that it is some magic formula but i kind of do it to help see if it will get off some of the wax that comes from the grocery store okay to do all the things that we're doing today here are the tools that i'm going to be using i'm going to be using my chopper because this is the best thing ever for doing dices for anything onions zucchini everything that you're going to dice up this is a great tool to do if you don't want to use your knife i'm going to use my handy dandy shredder i'm probably going to use my knife and then i'm going to use this to do my slices for my zucchini it's certainly not necessary you can use a knife and just make your slices okay for our slices that we're going to use some seasonings on i am just going to go through here and do they're going to be approximately a quarter inch the thinner that you make these the crispier they will be at the end because they just are thinner but if you uh you might find also that super thin ones stick to your sheets your trays your mesh whatever you're using so i just get approximately a quarter all right so there you go perfect little crinkle zucchinis okay i'm gonna do these what you can do also when you do your chips um you can put them in a little i don't know if you want to put them in a baggie and then just put your seasoning inside the baggie then shake them up and then put them on here especially if you're only doing one kind of flavor you can do that but because i'm going to do a couple of different flavors i am going to just man i did get a couple of these super thick didn't i i'm going to just put them on a tray do this all right now these are going to be done with my favorite this is my favorite everything but the bagel seasoning this is what i use and i just go in here and shake some of this onto each one you know what i could do it a little better think about an eighth of a teaspoon on each one just shake it on here something cool about the crinkle cut is you know without having to use any oil the crinkle cut kind of keeps the seasonings on a little better than just having the flat but i'm going to show you what i usually do too if you get a little extra on there you know what doesn't matter because this tastes so good when it's done i like my my vegetable chips flavored pretty heavily so what i would do after is come through here and just lightly press this into the zucchini kind of stick into that flesh a little better if that's something that you want to do you can try that okay here's the first tray now the second tray for my oldest who likes things a little spicy and why yes i did cut out a little extra off of another zucchini and a half or something else just to make sure i have the right number on here or i could have done that okay i'll take this small one off and add it okay he loves to use this i'm seasoning i don't know how to pronounce it i've never heard anybody pronounce it i've only ever seen it in print this is the seasoning he loves it is spicy and a little lime flavor and i was reading through some of the comments on my facebook page this week um about salt in in watermelon uh because i just did a video on how to dehydrate watermelon that i'll put up in the icards above and somebody mentioned that they put this on their watermelon and i thought gosh that would be actually really great for the son of mine who loves all of the spice because this has a lime flavoring in it and lime on watermelon is really good so he'd probably love this so i'm just sprinkling this on not super heavy but just enough to give it some flavor all right there are his zucchini chips ready to go um doing chunks what i end up doing is taking the ends off they can also be dried and just thrown in for your zucchini powder that you don't really care about because they will work just fine just chop them up a little better you do not have to peel these if you don't want to if you want to because you don't like the peeling on them that's fine too that's up to you i just don't bother um because i'm fine with it just like it is all right so i'm going to take my chopper i'm going to put a section in and there we go those are the dices that we're going to be using for soups and stews and casseroles down the road whenever we want it's not quite and these chop up really well if you want a smaller dice uh this this full star comes with a smaller dice like this you can also cut your larger ones into thirds and that will give you a smaller chunk even if you like the larger size dice this way but you don't want it so thick you can easily just put your your larger zucchini in thirds okay so what i have here is an entire band full of larger zucchini chunks that will work fine in soups if you like them smaller then cut that do them a little smaller all right so now we've got our dices out that should fit this is probably too large maybe three zucchini i don't remember i didn't count i'll give you a uh i have a blog post already ready of um all the different ways that you can dry zucchini to make it work for you for things so i'm going to link it down in the description box below it's got some other ideas such as zucchini candy which is a way of doing zucchini to make them like little gummies that my friend laurie from common sense homestead did that is always a really popular way of drying your zucchini and having it for snacks that are healthy i know some people use these as they dry and then they make mock um apple uh pieces for doing like some kind of mock apple pies and that's another way you could do it so i've got um that stuff down in the co in the comments in the description box below i've got the link to that so some other ways to do this so here are our dices ready to go into the dehydrator for soup stews and casseroles okay four shreds now normally when you're gonna cook you're gonna shred your zucchini and then you're gonna let it and you're gonna ring it to get rid of some of that moisture when you're dehydrating you don't have to do that if you want to you can because you can do whatever you'd like i just find that the little bit of time that it takes to dry to dry un squeezing is that a word uh if you just dry it like it is it will dry it doesn't need extra it doesn't need the extra work on your end on this end to make the drying process go any faster so i'm going to take these and i'm going to do a large [Music] braid [Music] now if you have a food processor or a kitchenaid uh or even in some other tool that makes this go faster for you use it because it's worth it so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna do one large zucchini separate it do another one and separate it so that you can just see the size of what it looks like when it's finished because they shrink up a lot so that's approximately two cups of shredded raw zucchini that could be squeezed because you'll see let's see you can drip it it has a lot of moisture in it it's just really not necessary to do before you're going to dehydrate the dehydrating process we'll have these dried out really quickly so there's no real reason to do that all right i'm just using my bench scraper to [Music] put these out on my tray i love this thing it's so useful for cutting so much meeting dough which is what they were originally made for but they helped so much with doing kind of this kind of prep work for vegetables i'm making such a mess do you make a big mess in the kitchen are you a clean cook or i meant like a i shouldn't say clean because i'm not dirty i'm just messy and uh and i've not ever been one to to be really good at keeping a clean tidy counter space when cooking because i just make a big mess and i'm i embrace my mess all right so i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna spread these out a little bit uh they're gonna shrivel up like mad but i want to do this so that you can see how it dries and i'm going to keep the equivalency done this way not that it matters in the end because they're going to all go together but this is what basically what you can do with it now you can spread it out as much as you can possibly spread it out and it will help them dry faster because the more surface area that you have to work with oh you know what why does it matter this was two cups so we'll remember that i'm not going to bother keeping them separate they don't need to be separate and just spread them out the best you can on your tray they will shrink up like crazy as they dry so they will separate on their own i'm really big proponent of making sure that you've got space between all of your pieces to have proper airflow so that things dry at the appropriate time and you don't have spots where it's still wet except i also know there are some foods that shrink like mad so i am not so fussy about those so that is two cups of freshly grated zucchini going in the dehydrator okay the next thing i have here is a bowl full of um i would say it's about a half cup of teriyaki sauce and about two tablespoons of water the ratio is never important depending on what your flavor is but we're going to make some jerky out of this zucchini so what you want to do is you're going to take one half inch one quarter inch slabs oh to one half a minute granted the thinner the better because they dry more more efficiently that way but you want some good some slabs okay they are going to shrink so don't worry about that but what you're going to do is you're going to marinate these now normally i would have these in a baggie to go for two or three hours before i do this but because we're we're working through the video i didn't prepare them ahead of time which i should have done some of these would be like tiny tiny little like beacher keep them in like jerky sticks so i can marinate them this way but what i'm going to do is i've got an extra big reusable bag make sure that's about had all of its life worn out of it so this is how it's gonna go while i prep everything else and get it already we're gonna let this marinade in the refrigerator as long as i can do before we have to get it in the machine so here you go just like this okay the thing i am going to warn you about doing the jerky is that this is going to stay in your trays so uh or stain anything that you want to put it on so if you care about that sort of thing then you're going to want to put this on parchment paper that can be thrown away i don't care so much because i've got some some of these sheets that are stained from whatever they're doing that i just know that's what life is i don't care that my all my sheets stay clean i just keep a few to keep clean for um for photos and stuff but real life means that your prep materials do not um do not stay perfect forever okay now these have not marinated anywhere near long enough but i don't have time and i'm gonna go ahead and just lay them out i'm going to do skin side down wherever possible these are going to shrink some of these are going to shrink up to be really tiny like slimgen kind of things and going to be intense with flavor of this teriyaki sauce i wish i had more time but i don't so still it'll be it'll be a fun treat to come back to after okay so this is what your teriyaki jerky will look like when you're getting ready to dry it you're going to want to on a fruit leather sheet of some kind parchment paper fruit leather that you don't care about getting stained there you go into the dehydrator we move okay so what i'm doing now is i'm prepping up a bunch of pieces of zucchini chunks to go into my food processor now the reason i'm doing this is that i'm going to make zucchini flour ultimately that's what this is going for and zucchini flour can be used as a replacement in your baking recipes with about one half cup of zucchini flour replacing one half cup of flour you can choose whether or not you're going to do all of it or just part of it or whatever i'm going to just stop here i have a friend her name is victoria and she runs a modern homestead blog um she is the queen oh it would help if i get this right she is the queen of using alternative flowers to use for baking and cooking because of her family uh needing something a little different so i am this is all for her okay so i'm gonna leave a link down to her web post her blog post down in the description box below that teaches you how to use flour this way in recipes she's got a really awesome gluten-free chocolate cake that she uses with squash powder that you'll love if you are keto friendly if you are i need to be gluten free etc so here's how i do it she has a different way of doing it but for me just making this flour i use as part of my vegetable flour i'm at my vegetable powder that i put in everything because it works that way too but i just want to let you know there are ways to use this to replace your regular flour in baking so here's how i'm going to do this i'm just going to do some rough chopping and for doing this flower or this powder whichever way you want to call it whichever way you plan on using it i could have just sat and shredded all this but this works so much faster and you can do this if you want to do this in place of shreds when you're doing a recipe that you're trying to do some zucchini you know some zucchini bread or zucchini muffins that calls for a lot of shredded you can just do it in chunks like this too it doesn't have to be an exact shred so let me get the next batch going now to go on my trays i am going to just lay this out i am not measuring because right now i just don't need to i'll have the equivalently equivalent equivalency chart i also know that approximately one cup of fresh equals one quarter cup of dried equals about a tablespoon of powder when you're wanting to add it into a recipe that works that's your equivalency so that you know about what you're replacing things with okay so to finish all of this off i'm pulling out the nesco i wish that i could get the excalibur out because it would have given me uh more room but we just haven't figured out a way to put it into my drying space um that doesn't require building a platform yet and if i have it out right here it's so noisy within our family and we do everything right kind of together right here then it's just too noisy so i broke out the nest coat so as i'm gonna i'm just gonna pour this onto the sheets and and then just spread it all out now i have planned on having the most abundant garden this year and having so many zucchini to make as much powder as i could for a whole year and plans did not work out that way with weather and being gone for an extended time with a medical emergency with my family so um i am not going to be able to get as much of this done for storage as i had hoped because you know what zucchini is still really expensive in the grocery store it's ridiculous how expensive it is considering how prolific those things grow and i know no one who's growing zucchini around me i have a friend who has a farmer's market business uh and a farm and she offered me yesterday she was like i wish we lived closer i've got this stuff growing out of my eyeballs i could have given you so much when she heard that i bought extra for doing this but this will be enough just to add to my stuff now here's the coolest thing those of you who haven't followed me before this is a great hack to do your nesco trays that you can still use this space here it still gets airflow like it needs i just bought some generic um mesh for dehydrators that are 14 by 14 and then i cut them down into a circle and i can just sit here and do this all i want not have to worry about those holes that the nesco has for its sheets so put as much of this as i can see i told you i'm just messy this gives me a little bit more surface area to work with and i can pile a little bit more on spread this out take a little bit of this off and add one more tray okay so that you can see what we have going on here zucchini bits for powder two trays of flavored zucchini [Music] one tray of zucchini dices one tray of zucchini jerky one tray of shredded zucchini now you could do zoodles on here but that would work too then you know any shape will work depending on how you want to put it into a meal then we have three trays in this nesco of zucchini shred i mean the zucchini bits like this and on this fourth tray right here i didn't show you i put one of the solid sheets of uh four fruit leathers for nesco in there so that it would catch anything that might fall through that one tray that has the hole in it and it has the holes on the sides so just in case there's anything falling through so here we go they are all going to be done at when i get this plugged in it'll turn on so i'm going to plug it in while we're talking we're going to dry this all at 125. you can certainly dry this lower if you'd like if you prefer to keep something that keeps more of its nutrients but we're going for a mix of nutrients and efficient drying so we're going to 125 the time is going to be set to run as long as it goes because it just doesn't matter i don't ever use that timer for anything other than going oh it went off i need to reset it so this will take approximately 5 to 10 hours it just depends on your machine how much humidity is in your zucchini um the thickness that you cut things uh it will all dry at different times so during this time i'll go ahead and pull it out but what i but i mean i'll go ahead and pull it out and show you but i'm just going to leave everything in there until it's all dry because you want good and dry produce when you're putting away for storage okay we are at the six or seven hour mark i didn't double check my time these crumbles are probably done i'm gonna leave them in now because they won't be hurt to stay in um it's not gonna do anything to them at all uh the chips are still probably four or five hours away some of them are getting small and ready to get if they're in but then we've got some thicker ones in here too so this is why it's important to keep your um your uh slices at the bathroom one quarter mark that makes the best chip there are our everything bagel seasoning they still have a while to go here are our dices and as you can you may not be able to tell these are starting to shrivel um they still look like they're not you know you're looking at it looking like they're not done at all but i can tell how they have definitely started to shovel down so they will take they will take longer than if i then if i had uh peeled them but we're fine with them just like this so we're just going to keep going and let them have all the time they need to dry which will probably be overnight for them and then here's what the jerky is looking like at this point you know it's not pretty but it's going to taste really good later and then our last tray of the uh these are the shredded and these are dry okay let start up again okay so let's start off with results i'm going to be open with you about what happened um by the time that i went to bed last night my chips still weren't done so i just set the machine at 95 and i just let it run overnight then i had a couple of meetings this morning that made it to where i couldn't get to this immediately so that's the thing about dehydrating is if you just turn your machine down just let it go most of everything that you're going to make except for fruit leathers or jerky really can't be over dried especially if you're putting it away for storage so i just let it go while i knew that i couldn't get to it so the results this morning are from just under 24 hours of drying but they certainly didn't need this so this is your the mints that i made of all of my zucchini this will be made into a powdered a little bit all right this is my shreds this is what your shredded zucchini would look like so when you're ready to use this in any kind of muffin or if you want to put it into cooking you can rehydrate this first if you want or you can just throw it in if it's not the main source of substance in your muffin so if you're making zucchini muffins and you have a bunch of this shredded you're going to want to rehydrate it then kind of do the same squeeze most of the juice out because you want it to be like it was fresh when you're making it that way because it's part of the bulk of the muffin now if you're just adding this to the muffin because you want to add some zucchini you can do it like this add about a tablespoon of extra water for every cup of zucchini that you're putting in and that should handle the added moisture needed to rehydrate your shreds but this is basically what your shreds look like now if i had wanted to i could have gone through and just um made sure that i kind of separated them out a little bit more but even just this little bit right there they'll break up pretty easily and you'll have small shreds now here's our jerky if i like i said yesterday if i had had taken the skin off if i had peeled these they wouldn't have shriveled up so much and what we're looking at is a leathery consistency because of the the sugars and the jerky and these are uh certainly good um these are really good uh they've been in 24 hours they should be dry you know what give them a minute to cool off we'll see what they're like because i just pulled everything out but the sugars and the jerky are going to make it not do as well as if you just put them into dry without it still makes them kind of soft oh man that's good though okay here are our chunks so they're dry they are ready to go and you can store these in an airtight container and you know go through your conditioning phase of letting them sit for a week shake the jar up every day to make sure they're not sticking to each other or sticking to the sides of the jar or that you're not seeing any kind of moisture that's within a jar and then put them into the jar you plan on storing them and then when you're ready to make soup you want to put a handful of these into your soup let them simmer for a while because they need to rehydrate first then they still need time to cook they're ready to go this is just perfect summer in a soup all year long then here are our chips this with the spicy lime chip sauce spicy lime seasoning this with everything but the bagel seasoning um these are my favorites because i just love them again if you had chosen to make your chips by peeling them first they wouldn't shrink up so much but we don't care the skin is where a lot of the nutrition is too so these are yummy crunchy awesome i love those things i can eat on those all summer long and for these i would just store in an airtight container that's very small you don't want a lot of extra air and they will last you until you finish them which is probably going to be tomorrow okay our last thing is just the same shredded zucchini that i did not shredded but the minced zucchini that's what i'm going to call it the stuff that i just did in the blender in the food processor on uh on in the in the kasori so this is awesome for making powder throwing it into a super stew or casserole just to have some added bulk of something that you want you could throw these into a smoothie honestly you could because they're perfect they they have a neutral enough flavor that if you put it in with other stuff it just added greens to it that will help bulk up the nutrition so next thing we're going to do is we're going to make some powder okay what i have in this bowl are my shreds and my um minced zucchini um that i did i'm just doing it all so i can show you the powder and i'm just gonna empty this into a bowl [Music] i didn't measure out exactly how much i had to start with because you know i just keep this in a jar going and take out what i need when and this is not the finest grind i can do it a little more but that gave me about i don't know about half a cup of flour right there so how would i store this i have a clean little pint jar right here and oops i found some more sometimes when you are doing that i put the wrong lid on there with no wonder um when you were doing this and you find that you can't get some things can you imagine if i had ground that when you want to add a little bit more sorry when you find that you have some that's not grinding well or you're going to do more of a grind you can always add a little bit of the powder that's in there it actually does help facilitate the movement of product in the beginning when it's trying to do that first pulse grind to have a little extra powder in there to help all right here we go again much better you can see that's a finer grind in there all right so this is going into our jar and typically i would tell you that you should recondition this powder and whether you mean by recondition you would dry it again basically that's all you're doing to try to protect your powder so i would put this on the cookie sheet in my oven that's been warmed to its lower temperature turned off and allowed this to dry or i would put it in a muffin tin not a muffin tin a muffin paper or cupcake paper a coffee filter or a shallow dish back into my dehydrator to allow it to dry but for right now i'm going to let it cool off a little bit in my jar and it's already gotten cool already and because i'm going to be using it immediately i'm not going to worry about that conditioning phase so but if you were storing that's exactly what i would do to make sure that all of the powder inside is uh dried off completely before you store it because any little bit of moisture that's in here is likely cause some clumping and you don't want clumping in your powders okay so we have our completed diced zucchini chips right here well chunks right here these are the dices that i dried and then what i did was i wanted to show you how to rehydrate them this is what i do especially if i can plan ahead of time i will put a my vegetables into a jar i will cover it completely with water so that everything is submerged in water before i put it in the refrigerator overnight the next morning when i wake up this is what it looks like it is completely rehydrated now it does not come back to what it looked like when it was um when it was fresh because you've broken some of the fibers down and the structure of the zucchini in the drying process but this will easily just now be thrown into a super stew or anything that you're working with like that to to cook along with every every other vegetable if you need to then you can when you take this out and it's too wet like if you want to put it into a casserole but you don't want all of the water that's in it you can bring this out a little bit and just let it drain but i just wanted to let you see what it looked like when it was rehydrated again this was just sitting overnight in the fridge it's been in there for about eight hours after this it works the same way with the shreds just put them in some water let them have time to rehydrate um wring them out in a tea towel to take the excess moisture out because they will absorb a lot of moisture that you don't want and use them as you would when they were fresh so if you're interested in learning more dehydrating i've got a video right here that you need to watch and until i see you again next time happy dehydrating if you have any questions drop them in the comments below i'd love to answer them for you

Channel: The Purposeful Pantry

Views: 112,473

Keywords: the purposeful pantry, zucchini recipes, dehydrating zucchini, zucchini chips, zucchini jerky, drying zucchini, preserving zucchini, how to use zucchini, storing zucchini, zucchini shreds, how to dry vegetables, cosori dehydrator, too much zucchini, what to do with zucchini, dehydrating tips, easy dehydrating, dehydrating food, stock your pantry, dehydrating for beginners, how to make zuccini chips, saving zucchini

Id: a6m_PB6W2n4

Length: 33min 27sec (2007 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021