Dehydrating Adventures

I have been having fun with my dehydrator lately. I love going to you tube and watching videos about dehydrating different things. There are some really great ones on there. Some of my favorite ones are found at http://www.youtube.com/user/Dehydrate2store . She has a series of dehydrating videos – I think 10 or so – and they are well worth watching each of them. They have inspired me to do some really nice stuff. I will keep posting as I experiment more with dehydrating. I have some fruit leather on right now, bottled applesauce blended with some bottled cherries – drop them into the food processor, then spread on trays. Yummm! Healthy fruit leather.

I bought a large bag of sweet potatoes (frozen). I cooked them, and then mashed them in my food processor. Then I spread them out on parchment paper and dried them until they were crisp. Then I chopped them up in my processor, and ran them through my wheat grinder. And I have a bag of instant baby food – sweet potatoes. Very healthy and very yummy!!!

I dehydrated a bunch of applesauce. This was applesauce that I had bottle in the past two years and we haven’t used it all up, so I decided to dry it and grind it up to make more instant baby food, or applesauce for baking. It actually rehydrated just as nice as it was originally. Here are a few of the pictures.

It rehydrates back to normal applesauce. Really nice!! One side note here, if you add sugar to your applesauce when you bottle it, then it doesn’t dehydrate as nice, and won’t powder because it kind of crystalizes. It still works though, just a stickier powder.

Then I also had some bottles sour cherries that we haven’t used up from last year, and I thought they would make really yummy craisin like cherries. And wow are they good. They are nice to eat plain, or in salads, or in muffins and baking. This year I don’t think I will even bottle the cherries, I am just going to pit them and dry them.

Pretty tart still, yet really yummy!!