| Excalibur's
Heat Problems
I owned a Gardenmaster dehydrator for years and never felt comfortable
that I was getting the temperature I wanted. I discovered only later that
I could've used a meat thermometer – you embed the metal part of a meat
thermometer right into the food you are dehydrating and it measures the
food temperature.
But by that time I'd switched to L'Equip. What if the meat thermometer
had told me the food was not being dried at the temperature I'd set?
This is exactly what can happen with the Excalibur dehydrator. It's
notorious for its inaccurate thermostat. In fact, it does not have a thermostat
but a cheaper thermodisc.
Well-known rawfood teachers have publicly stated that the Excalibur
is calibrated too hot and does not meet the raw community's needs.
One rawfood author e-mailed me:
“A reader sent me
an email saying that both he and his mother had bought an Excalibur and
they were upset that the thermostat was not accurate. They were using a
meat thermometer and sticking it into the food. When it was supposed to
be 85°F it was running at 120° so they couldn't even get their
dehydrators to run at lower than 120 because 85 is the lowest temperature
on it.
So I tested mine too and
I found that my recommended 95°F (that I suggest in my book for most
dehydration) was 15 degrees higher, so I had been dehydrating at 110°F
all along. I really felt deceived.”
I (Val) personally wrote to Excalibur questioning them about this problem,
and they replied:
“The consensus is
wrong! The Excalibur does not cook the food. Some people are making claims
based upon a misunderstanding. Dehydration is an evaporation process which
cools the foods. We have tested foods with highly accurate testing instruments,
and have found that the food is 20-25 degrees cooler than the air.”
I then forwarded this reply to the author who’d reported the meat thermometer
test. The reply was:
“Basically there
is a controversy within the raw community (nothing new) about the degree
of heat acceptable in dehydrating food. My stance is that we should let
each person decide at what temperature they will dehydrate their food.
If [names famous rawfood author, not Sproutman] thinks that he can
dehydrate bread at 140°F and not cook it – well that's OK with me.
But if I feel that I don't want to dehydrate my bread at higher than 100
or 105 then why shouldn't I be able to do that?
If a machine says you turn
the nob to here and it will be 95° and you turn the nob to here and
it will be 100°, then it should reasonably be within that range. I
can understand a 5 degree variation maybe, but no way should it be 15 to
35 degrees off. That is just false advertising and I think that Excalibur
know it and that is why they try so hard to convince people that the air
temperature does not equal the temperature of the food.
There is some small degree
of truth in Excalibur's argument ... for example if you start a bread dehydrating
at a higher temperature and because of the bulkiness of the bread (meaning
it is not thin like crackers or wafers) it's true that the temperature
of the bread mass will be lower than the air temperature at least on the
inside of it. But at some point when the dehydration continues, and the
moisture is reduced, you must be able to reduce the heat because if you
don't reduce it when there is less moisture in it, then you will be cooking
it.
If you don't have an accurate
thermostat in your dehydrator, you won't be able to do this. ...Many people
that wrote to me could not get their Excalibur dehydrators to reduce below
120°F.”
Since the above-quoted author reported on Excalibur’s inaccurate thermodisc,
I’ve heard that some of the newer Excaliburs are now doing the opposite!
I received an email:
"This one errs on
the lower end which means that when you dial it to the number, let's say
95 deg. F - it seems to be running at 85 deg F or lower, so you still can't
get an accurate reading on it. It is just frustrating."
You should never dry food at too low a heat because it can spoil before
it dries. It’s like leaving food out on a hot day, it goes bad!
Bottom line for me is, consider getting L'Equip where the temperature
is controlled by computer, where you can increase or decrease it in 3-degree
increments and be guaranteed that’s the exact temperature you're drying
your food at. I bought L’Equip because Excalibur is too expensive to ship
to South Africa, and I'm happy with it.
OR get the Taylor thermometer with Excalibur (in our order form) OR
replace the Excalibur thermostat with a new reliable one, as shown here
under Convert Excal to Low-Heat.
Excalibur
Advantages
The plus side of Excalibur is its large drying area. For a little extra,
you can buy a pack of nine 14x14-inch solid Teflex sheets, giving you 12
square feet to dry blended foods like sprouted grain crackers and fruit
roll-ups. In a year's time when it's out of warranty, you can use my plans
here to switch the thermodisc.
L'Equip has only six solid plastic sheets each 6x11 inches, giving you
only three square feet to dry blended foods. This is enough for me – it
makes two one-quart jars full of crackers – so I use L'Equip because I
don't need a giant today.
However, when I first started to transition to raw foods, and ate many
more crackers daily, L'Equip would not have met my needs. I used GardenMaster
then, but today I'd use Excalibur and install my own thermostat.
Another plus for Excalibur is its removable trays, so you can place
a pyrex dish inside it, or make a 3-inch high pineapple cake. L'Equip does
not have this.
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Tel:
+1-989-689-0005
