The Nesco Dehydrator arrived this week.
Two days ago I made my first batch of fruit and veggie slices. They came out of the dehydrator looking like miniature charms, incapable of having taste. But when I bit into them, I tasted the WHOLE fruit. How can something so small and charm-like taste exactly like the fruit they came from? The shrunken oranges, tomatoes, cucumbers, banana and apple slices could just as well have been mounted with a magnet and stuck to the refrigerator.
My new mandolin slicer and “no-cut gloves” arrived yesterday, in time for my second batch. Now I sliced away with no worries of cutting myself.
I had read about blanching sweet potatoes. I decided to experiment, labeling each of my six dehydrator trays, 1 through 6, and labeling each half of each tray, 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B. I wrote down what was on each half-tray:
1A: sweet potatoes (plain); 1B: (oil and salt)
2A: sweet potatoes blanched (plain); 2B: (oil and salt)
3A and 3B: sweet potatoes blanched (oil and lemon pepper)
4A: bananas (with cinnamon); 4B: sweet potatoes blanched (sliced wider, plain)
5A: beets (plain); 5B: (salt)
6A: apples blanched (cinnamon sugar);
6B: apples not blanched (cinnamon sugar)
This morning at 6 o’clock, after 12 hours of drying, I sampled and bagged the above tray contents. Guess what? I like the un-blanched and un-oiled pieces better. The beet chips had little taste. My favorite of the batch: The cinnamon-sugar-coated un-blanched apples.
I just loaded six more trays with kale, sliced apples, oranges and pineapple. I can’t wait until this evening to munch away on some good stuff. And the stuff I don’t like? How cool it would look on my fridge.
