Can someone advise me on a good food dehydrator to buy.

Question

Any good recipes or items to dehydrate as well

Answer 1

Yes Dani

and

NO they come with a recipe book

just 2

Answer 2

Here is an article about choosing the right dehydrator:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food...

We bought the L’ Equip model, as we felt that suited our needs the most. Cheapest place to buy it is. They sell them for $140 incl. shipping:

http://dehydrators.livingright.com/item6...

You can get some smaller ones in Target, Walmart and Macy’s but they really don’t work as well and is not as flexible. What I like in particular with this one is that we can add trays to it without it taking up much extra space. Only problem with adding too many trays though is that the engine then not big enough to really dehydrate the top layers, but then I rotate it.

For some information about how to dry the food or build a dehydrator yourself (the true organic way of doing it):

http://www.appropedia.org/Chris's_ENGR30...

The L’Equip dehydrator came with a book stating how to dry the different veggies and fruit etc.

A lot of people just dry a few things in the oven and that is also a good solution for the occasional drying. But it takes longer time and uses much more energy than if you use an electric dehydrator and the results also less even. With the amount we dry (veggies, herbs, fruit) then the oven would not have been enough for our family. Also the nutrition level is much better preserved when doing a controlled drying with a dehydrator than in the oven. And I feel we loose some of the point of using local organic food if we afterwards waste a ton of energy to preserve it. One can also build a solar dehydrator at home but they are very dependent on sunshine and not very practical in this area where we cannot guarantee sunshine 24/7 – besides the weather is far too humid for the foods to dry properly during the summer.

We have chosen to use a dehydrator because it preserves the nutrients in the food much better than freezing and canning (although we also do can some food). We also find it more practical in terms of storage than frozen food that needs to waste a lot of energy remaining frozen, and risking the food to spoil in power outage. The dried food is also excellent when we go camping as it both lasts thru all weather and we do not have to worry about keeping it cold, besides from that it is much more lightweight to carry.

I dehydrate tomatoes, zuccini, egg plant, peber fruit etc. The veggies I use in stews, soups, as topping on pizza's etc.

I also dehydrate fruits in stead of canning and we use them as snacks on the road or in the cereal eg. mango, strawberries, raspberries etc.