Eating Healthier in Today's World

How to Use Your Home Dehydrated Food

We have talked about how to dry the different kinds of dehydrated foods in a Dehydrator.  Now once it is dried what do you do to use it.  This is actually even simpler than doing the drying.  Basically you add water.  There use to be a book out on using dehydrated food call "Just Add Water" that I have had for almost 40 years now, but that is exactly what you do.  The warmer the water the faster the food will reconstitute.  That is the word for adding the water back.  You place your food in a bowl, container, pot, etc. and just cover it with water.  If you use hot tap water it will reconstitute in about 10 to 15 min.  If you use cold water it may take 1/2 hr.

If I wanted to make apple pie from my dried apples, I would just place a couple of cups of dried apples in a bowl and cover them with water and once they have reconstituted, drain off the excess water and place them in the pie shell along with the sugar, cinnamon, flour and butter and bake as usually.  Can't get any easier!

You will never get the crunchy texture of a fresh apple back when you eat a reconstituted apple, but since the flavours and sugars are concentrated, it will taste extremely good.  This is where I really find the difference between a frozen product and a dried one is the flavour. 

One of my favourite ways of using vegetables is to powder them and make a cream soup.  We put the brocolli, or corn, or cauliflower, or tomato, etc. that has been dried to the brittle stage, in the blender and turn it on for a few seconds.   I then make a medium white sauce by putting 2 Tbsp. of butter and the same amount of white flour in a saucepan and whisk it around to make a roux, and then add 2 cup of milk (I use skim) and whisk it around until it gets thick.  I then add 1/4 cup of the vegetable powder and stir if with the whisk a few minutes, and it is done.  The longer it sits the better it tastes.  If it cools just add a little more milk and heat it up again.   This is a great recipe to add the dried cheddar cheese to as well. 

Of coarse, you can reconstitute the vegetables just as easy as the fruit.  If I am making a stew or soup I will just throw in the dried vegies and they will reconstitute in the broth or gravy .  Imagine using dried peas.  A fresh pea we cook until they are soft.  A dried pea, we reconstiute in water, and it becomes soft.  We then only have to heat until warm.  Less cooking means more nutrients and flavour left in the food. 

I use the powdered tomatoes the same way to make the pizza sauce or pasta sauce.  I just put a couple of Tablespoons of dried tomatoes, onion, green pepper in the blender and add a cup of water.  Turn the blender on and let mix for a min. or so and you are done with fresh uncooked tomato sauce that you can add to fresh vegetables in a fry pan or use as is.

Here are some more recipes and tips for dehydrating foods.

When we dry foods, the end product really becomes a slightly different food.  For example, a grape when dried is a raisin and will never be a grape again.  All prunes were plums, but not all plums will make prunes.  Only Prune plums become a prune.  The red and green plums become dried red or green plums.  Both these fruits were brought into the world to become dried fruits!  For example, what else can you do with a grape besides making juice and wine.  It makes raisins.  By the way try doing raisins in the dryer because you won't believe how good they are.  Unlike the raisins we buy, which are usually treated with sulphur and nitrates to help them dry, the raisins you make are just poked or dipped in boiling water for 20 sec. to pretreat and then dried naturally so they have a much better taste.

Here is my tip about when to buy your raisins.  Usually in September the Thompson green grapes go on sale.  Make it a point to get to know the produce manager in your local store as best as you can, because he is the one that will be able to give you some deals.  I bring him a loaf of bread or some buns I have made, to really soften him up.  Usually they package the good grapes.  You know the ones that are attached to the stems.  The loose grapes are either kept in the back or thrown out.  Ask him to save any loose grapes for you.  Loose grapes have fallen off the stems and maybe getting a little brown and overripe.  Well what do you want to do with them anyway.  Turn them browner!!  They are usually much sweeter because they are a little overripe and make great raisins.  I usually pay a couple of dollares for a case of the loose grapes.  I now make the raisins for a fraction of the cost it would to buy grapes.

I once remember a customer who came into the store one May, grinning from ear to ear.  She told me she had just made FREE fruit leather.  She had rhubarb in her garden and had cooked it up to soften it.  She had been given so FREE over ripe bananas at the grocery store which she used to sweeten the rhubarb.  She put them both in the blender and whizzed them up together and poured them on her fruit leather sheets to dry.  She said it was wonderful.