Preserving Food (Drying Methods)

[MyDigitalpoint]

One good way to have some of your favorite herbs, seeds, fruits and foods is drying them.

Drying or dehydration methods depend on the food you want to preserve, so I thought handy to share with you a guide that is available at the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

This guide covers the following topics

• Food Dehydrators
• Fruit Leathers
• Fruits (Colorado State University) pdf
• Fruits and Vegetables (University of Georgia) pdf
• Herbs
• Jerky
• Leathers and Jerkies (Colorado State University) pdf
• Mango Leather
• Packaging and Storing Dry Foods
• Peanuts
• Popcorn
• Pumpkin Seeds
• Sun Drying
• Sunflower Seeds
• Vegetable Leathers
• Vegetables (Colorado State University) pdf
• Vine Drying

Just point your browser to this address and click on the link of your interest for the complete drying guide, http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/dry.html

At this site you can also fin other guides for canning, freezing, fermenting, pickle, cure, smoke and store food

 

[Shellyann36]

I enjoy dehydrating my veggies, herbs and fruits. We have also dehydrated jerky before. I think out of it all pineapple is the best dehydrated followed by basil. Fresh basil dehydrated and added to a meatloaf mixture or turkey burgers is wonderful! Thanks for the link.

 

[Alrikidokie]

Great website, thanks for sharing!

 

[HerTasteBuds]

I guess that I would be described as the stubborn dehydrator! I do not follow any guidelines when it comes to my jerky. I marinate then I dehydrate it. It all goes in food saver bags until we want to eat it. All done. Been doing that since dehydrators came out. Did the same in my oven at 135 degrees for what seemed like 600 years of oven dehydrating!

As far as fruit, I have dehydrated pineapple, apples, bananas, strawberries and so forth and so on. Still no guidelines. I religiously use lemon juice as a preservative.
All of my dried fruits are stored in the food saver bags as well.

So far, no one has been sick but I am so incredibly careful with everything I do and use. You can't be lazy when it comes to food preservation.

 

[JoanMcWench]

I have not yet once dehydrated anything personally. I really really want to. I guess I just feel like it might be too much work? I don't know. My days keep getting shorter and shorter on me. I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone.

 

[Barbara G.]

Thank you for the great information. My goal this year is to plant more herbs on my back porch as well as do some containers with some veggies. I also want to learn how to do some canning this year.