I was wondering what equipment you'd need to dry food.

I think I've seen commercially available devices, but I'm not sure if you'd need one of those, or if it could be done another way.

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we have this inexpensive dehydrator that we got from Walmart.
it ws like 30 bucks and you could get extra trays. We make jerkey, dried fruits. The lemon candy is wonderful.
If you do get one, its fun to make dried fruit, jerkey.
But you will need to invest in a vacuum sealer. Its the one where you have the bags and you suck the air out and then heat seal it closed. That way your work will remain tasty. We just opened some that we dried 9 years ago and it was so good!
julie

We have a NuWave oven that you can use to dry food with as well as many other things. It is pricey but works really great so it was worth the $ we spent on it.

Food dehydrators are less expensive to operate but are only useful for a few months of the year. A convection oven can be the most economical investment if the proper model is chosen.

A convection oven that has a controllable temperature starting at 120 degrees F. and a continuous operation feature rather than a timer-controlled one will function quite well as a dehydrator during the gardening months. For the rest of the year it can be used as a tabletop oven.

I totally forgot about my food dehydrator until I read this post. We use to use it all the time to dry fruits. It is also just a fun thing to do. I bet you can get a food dehydrator for a decent price too.

Dehydrators are really nice for making jerky or snack mix, and drying out green food.

I've been tossing around the idea of getting one, but don't they use up quite a bit of power? I garden to save money mostly, and I don't want to throw that away on high energy bills.

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You would have to do a search, but I have been told that there are books out there that have methods for drying food using campfires and other methods used throughout history. I have been meaning to search for this myself in case I would ever need to use it.

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You mean like a smoker? Same basic idea, no reason why it wouldn't work. Or on a hot and sunny day, just put the food items in a clear box. Sun dried tomatoes are good!

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We have 2- 500w, 5 tray dehydrators. Based on our local electric rate it costs us about $.40 to run them for an hour. It takes about 8 hrs to dry apples and pears, and 9 for peaches. That's about $3.50 for a pound of dried fruit. It's considerably more expensive at the store.

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