What Foods to Dehydrate

I need my home-dried fruit (apples, bananas, yum) and crackers – sweet oatmeal cookies, savory carrot-cake, and nachos chips – all raw.

My dogs and cats love crackers too – I give them the ones with less dried fruit, like oat-date which is mostly sprouted grain. They'd normally eat pre-digested grains in the stomach of a bird.

Raw Snacks

Dehydrated snacks are healthy for you. They restore your teeth instead of destroying them. They're fun to give to family and friends!

So many times I've been with loved ones where my dried snacks were the party hit! People love raw food when it tastes divine.

It's so quick to make them. You can even dry high-protein Energy Soup – recipe is here under Blending. If you can blend it, you can dehydrate it!

Please feed your family and friends delight-full food, free of synthetic chemicals, because you control what you are drying.

Fruits

Fruits taste sweeter when safely dried at low temperature. With store-bought dried fruit, you never know what temperature it was dried at.

Fruits dried at home below 115°F are especially nourishing because all the minerals and vitamins in fresh fruits become highly concentrated in the dried product.

Commercial growers, even sun-dried organic, cannot select the very best fruits to dry. You can. Sweet sun-rich nutrient-rich fresh fruits become great-tasting dried fruits. Make your favorite fruits last all the year round! Also summer herbs like dill, parsley and basil.

Rhio reports in her recipe book Hooked On Raw that since the early 1960's all dried shredded coconut sold in stores, is pasteurized to give it an indefinite shelf life.

Coconuts are the only source of saturated fat for vegans, besides the fat our body itself makes. They're especially important for body-builders. Coconut is delicious in raw icecream. I love to blend pineapple, banana, dried coconut and raw honey, and freeze it for hot summer days.

To preserve your own supply of coconut, wash and grate fresh coconut meat, spread it out on the solid fruit-leather sheets, and dehydrate at 95°F until very dry. Keeps up to six months in a glass bottle in refrigerator.

To convert F into C – it's, e.g., 95°F minus 32 multiplied by 5, divided by 9 = 35°C.

Vegetables

Dehydrating removes the water, so flavors are deliciously concentrated.

Veggies you can spice up even more, e.g. thinly slice raw zucchini and potatoes, dip in soya sauce (like organic unpasteurized Nama Shoyu), sprinkle with garlic or onion powder, and dehydrate into zingy chips. What a difference from a fattening bag of fried potato chips!

Actually my favorite is Nachos Chips:  2C (cups) soft nuts e.g. macadamia or cashew, 1.5C red bell pepper, 1C orange pieces, 4 cloves garlic, 1 juiced lemon, 1/4t seasoning salt e.g. Herbamare, 3/4t  chilli powder preferably from home-dried/ground hot chilli peppers. Blend until smooth in food processor, spread 1/8-inch thick on solid sheets, and dry at 105°F (40°C). Use less chilli powder if you don't like it too hot, but the sulfur heat of chillis is good for you – especially good for ulcers and killing parasites.

If like me you have L'Equip, then cut plastic cling wrap to fit solid sheets, and spread batter onto this. It makes it easy to flip the blend onto mesh screens after a while for faster drying.

For a high-protein crunchy snack, grow lentil or buckwheat or quinoa sprouts in the easy Automatic Sprouter here – at $40 discount here with Dehydrator.

Then soak sprouts in soya sauce, spread out on fruit-leather sheets, and dehydrate at 100°F for 24 hours. Buckwheat is my favorite, it's crunchy yet melts in your mouth.

For raw pasta, sprout wheatberries for a couple of days until the short thick shoot is about the length of the berry (not the long hair-like rootlets). Then grind the sprouts in the Samson Juicer using the noodle nozzle, to give you long thin ropes, which you can spice up and even braid first, then dehydrate at 110°F – no higher, because enzymes die at 118°F.

I dehydrate the quinoa sprouts at 5° lower temperature because they look so sensitive! Of course L'Equip is the only dehydrator that gives you this incredible fine-tuning in heat control.

Raw Condiments

All spicy sprouts can be dried, ground and used as fresh living condiments to spice up your foods. Thank you to Sproutman's Kitchen Garden Cookbook for this idea.

Sprout garlic, radish, cabbage, onion or mustard seeds for a couple of days, dry the sprouts at 110°F for 2-3 hours, grind in Samson Juicer or coffee grinder, and keep each one refrigerated in glass condiment jar.

If any is too spicy, mix with sprouted alfalfa for milder taste.

Save Money

Bottled and canned food must be used up once you open it. Dried foods last for months in a jar and lose no nutrients.

Buy fruit and veggies cheaply in season. Dehydrate in bulk, then all year round enjoy their burst of flavor and fresh nutrition.

Dehydrating fits more food into less space – you can dry 25 pounds of tomatoes down to 1-2 lbs and fit them all in a one-quart jar.

Eat Local, Reduce Pollution

When you dehydrate local produce in season, you enjoy dried whole tomatoes, marinated dried tomatoes and tomato leather in the winter, and you've not consumed the huge energy of importing tomatoes.

When I still ate cooked pasta, then instead of using pasta sauce from a jar, I simply added dried tomatoes and fresh onions to the pasta while it simmered a few minutes. Then raw garlic and olive oil when removed from stove. Yumm, delicious! Bottled sauce is a machine food, don't eat it.

You can dry almost anything that contains water – items you may never have considered, such as tofu. And of course herbs and flowers for potpourri and flower arrangements. Excalibur with its removable trays, is best for this and for drying craftwork.

Enjoy the Great Outdoors

Dried foods are tasty, nutritious, lightweight, easy to prepare, easy to carry, and easy to use when traveling or back-packing. They're 100% WHOLE foods, no machine food here.

Machine food is making everyone so sick. Your body wasn't made by a machine. It's crying for the finely balanced nutrition of Mother Nature, where choirs of LIVING vitamins, minerals and proteins sing together in heavenly harmony.

Nature's food will have you singing and dancing! In the first month, you'll notice the amazing power of raw and living foods to transform your life.

Fresh blended fruit, neatly dried. Strawberries and pineapple taste like high-priced candy yet are so nutritious and healthy.

Fruit leather is a hit with sugar-loving children – and frees them from addiction to white sugar, chemicals and preservatives.