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Dehydrating Food is Fast and Easy—Here’s How and What to Use for Drying Fruit, Making Beef Jerky, etc
re: nutrition
re: How to Make Beef Jerky
For many years I dried persimmons from my hand-planted persimmon tree. Persimmons bear heavily every other year and this year the thing is so loaded that it might literally tear itself apart, should an early windy storm roll through. This happened about 15 years ago, and I lost a major branch.
I strictly avoid fructose* in any processed food or added in any way. Fruit I eat, but fresh is better. But I just hate seeing fruit drop and rot, mostly wasted. The crows get some, but it also attracts coyotes and that’s a bad plan for Tigger. So I give some away, and dry some, and some inevitably rots. It’s too much to deal with in a heavy-bearing year. As a huge plus, a persimmon tree laden with fruit is a joy to behold (sometimes as late as early February!), and that’s preceded by its red-orange leaves.
* Excessive fructose (eg 90% of Americans via sugary drinks) is a major contributor to diabetes, metabolic syndrome, weight gain, etc). I love dried fruit, but it is not the ideal health food given its low bulk and relatively high sugar content. But at least it has nutrients, unlike most of the poison in the SAD diet most Americans eat.
Drying fruit or making jerky is easy
Drying fruit is trivially easy, and making beef jerky and kale chips is no harder. I have not tried rabbit brains, but Tigger keeps meowing on about it, so who knows.
Dry fruit fast and efficiently: How to Make Dried Persimmons.
Beef jerky is super easy too: have your butcher slice the meat 1/4" to 3/8" thick. Plan on a 4:1 ratio of wet to dry eg 20 pounds of meat makes 5 pounds of dry jerky. Marinate in tamari or soy sauce* for 8 hours, or just salt and/or black pepper. Set time on dryer, walk away until done. I like my jerky very dry, since it keeps forever that way. Use grass-fed and grass-finished beef if at all possibe. It is vastly better than the disgustingly moist garbage sold in stores (additives and/or preservatives and/or sugar and other chemicals).
* I have reservations about tamari and soy sauce in that I am unsure about excitotoxins eg MSG, so I am trending to not using it anymore.
Tips on food dehydrators
Thanks for using my Amazon links so I get credit/commission.
I use the Excalibur Food Dehydrator @AMAZON . The first Excalibur dehydrator I bought is still going strong after 20+ years of use! If you’re serious about drying food, don’t mess around with cheaper and/or smaller ones—you’ll just waste your money on the first crappy dryer and then get a better one.
- Get a dryer with temperature control and timer. I highly recommend the Excalibur Food Dehydrator 9-Tray Electric with 26-hour Timer, Automatic Shut Off and Temperature Settings @AMAZON. While the timer is not essential, it means you can walk away and know it will run the proscribed time and the food will be done or nearly done.
- Preparation and cleanup takes time. Anything less than ~10 square feet of drying area is most of the cost of a larger dryer, but with all of the food prep/dryer cleanup effort. The 15 square feet 9-tray dryer I use has turned out to be ideal.
- Avoid dryers with electronic anything, because all electronics are likely to fail. Do you have anything that hasn’t? I don’t. My two Excalibur dryers have been going 7 years and 20+ years respectively.
- You get what you pay for. There are plenty of toys under $100. You’ll just be wasting your money if you actually want to dry significant amounts of food and have the dryer last years.
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