Have you ever found yourself with an abundance of seasonal produce and wished your family could enjoy its taste and health benefits year round? Perhaps you’ve thought about canning, but find the process is labor-intensive or frightening because of the risk of contamination with dangerous bacteria. Canned foods require a lot of production time, supplies, and storage space, and many of their nutrients may be boiled out during the canning process.

Benefits of Drying Food at Home

Next to fresh produce, home-dehydrated fruits and vegetables are the most nutritious available! While dried fruits sold at stores may contain sulfur and other additives, you can dry them at home without adding anything at all. You simply wash them, slice them (if necessary), and place them in the dehydrator! Sugar isn’t needed, because when the water is removed from fresh fruit, its natural sugars are more concentrated. Similarly, dehydrated vegetables may taste slightly salty without any extra salt added, because of the concentration of their natural flavor. Dehydrated fruits and vegetables have a delicious, fresh taste.

While preserved foods from the grocery store may contain additives and chemicals, which are increasingly being implicated in health problems such as cancer and birth defects, you can eliminate these completely by dehydrating food at home. Dried at low settings, dehydrated produce loses almost none of its nutritional value. As evidence of the freshness of dehydrated foods, a tomato seed dehydrated at a low setting, when planted, will grow into a tomato plant!

The ease of dehydrating foods at home has already been implied. There is no need to blanch or cook anything or to treat the food in any other way.

Home dehydration is also economical. While the biggest cost may be your initial investment in the dehydrator itself, these machines typically are inexpensive to operate, adding only pennies to your electric bill for each hour of operation. In addition, consider the money that you can save by not buying expensive out-of-season produce or other store-bought alternatives. You can take advantage of seasonal produce on sale at the grocery store and vegetables from your own garden! Produce at the grocery store (bananas, for example) may be marked down because it is fully ripe, and you can buy it in large quantities and preserve it at peak ripeness. In addition, dehydrating is a great way to prevent waste and preserve leftovers.

Another advantage is that dehydrated foods have a higher shelf life than canned or frozen foods. In fact, dried and stored correctly, dehydrated produce will last years and years! Also, it takes up very little space on the shelf. Typically, four to five pounds of produce will weigh only one pound dehydrated, and go from occupying a large barrel to only a small bag.