The Experiment

 My new stove has a multipurpose oven, and one of the things it does is dehydrate. Now, I have never tried dehydration before but decided to give it a go. The one thing that I decided is that when I run the dehydrator, the oven will be full. So I use both racks and even put a smaller baking sheet on the bottom of the oven, and then I run the dehydrator over night. The oven keeps at a steady 150 degrees.

When I wake up, everything is done. The house is also warmed on these chilly mornings. Double duty, there!

This is my first experiment. 

This jar is about 1.5 quarts. Unbelievably, this jar contains 3 lbs of carrots, 3 lbs of celery, six large Vidalia onions, at least 4 trays of dehydrated tomatoes, zucchini, summer squash, corn, green beans. I just dehydrated whatever I found on sale, produce wise or whatever came from the garden. If I had part of a onion left over from whatever I was cooking, I just diced it up and put it on a parchment covered baking sheet. It was a great way to use up the last of the garden, when things were winding down, not enough to make a meal, but too much to waste.

It is my soup jar. I have tried this. I had made a little venison roast. I saved the broth from it. I chopped up the meat and dropped it back into the crock pot of broth. I added a half cup of dehydrated vegetables and enough water to cover it. I let the crock sit over night in the fridge and then popped it back into the crock pot on low the next morning. I added a handful of barley and let it go.

That evening, we had our bowl of venison-vegetable-barley soup. Tim said, 'This is good.' I said that I had used the dehydrated vegetables. He said, 'Really??? They don't taste any different from regular vegetables!'

He is a convert. He tells everyone.

I have been dehydrating potatoes too. We bought a 50 lb bag. 

This is a two quart container. You can see that it is about 2/3 full. This is 10 lbs of potatoes. I will do another 5 lbs tonight. My thoughts were to use them for scalloped potatoes. If they pass Betty Crocker's scrutiny, there is no reason it shouldn't work for me. 

I hunted online and discovered that there are quite a few people who swear by dehydrating.

I found an 'instant sauce mix' to use in making the scalloped potatoes. Dried milk, flour, cornstarch. Dried minced onion. Garlic powder, parsley, salt, pepper and ground mustard. 'Better than Betty's' they proclaim. 'No additives!' 

I wanted to also explain something else. You really can fall down quite a rabbit hole with this dehydrating stuff. Gz mentioned that she just braids her garlic and hangs it. We go through a lot of garlic in this house, either sautéed in olive oil and stored in the fridge or minced fresh.

This sauce recipe (and many other  dehydrating recipes) called for minced dried onion and garlic powder. I had a lot of fresh garlic and that bag of Vidalia onions. I wondered why you would buy that. If you were dehydrating, why couldn't you dehydrate those like everything else? So off I went to discover that for myself. I would call the experiment a success, but I will warn you that 3 trays of onions and one of garlic will bring you to tears! Luckily, we sleep with our bedroom door shut and windows open for the cool. By the time we got up the next morning, the tear makers were neutralized!

We will be putting these potatoes to the test on Sunday. We have company coming for barbecue. I will let you know.

This jar contains 40 ounces of fresh mushrooms. They were on sale at the grocery store, so I picked them up for dehydrating. They turned out great. I have used these already. I tossed a scoop of them into the tomato sauce I was making from the last of the tomatoes. Again,  they were (to us, anyway) indistinguishable from cooking with fresh mushrooms.

So...that is my experiment so far. I am pleased with the results. It is awfully nice to have the time to try my hand at new things.