Food dehydration – Why and why not to dehydrate food
Why not to dehydrate food
Dehydration is a form of food fragmentation, because it removes something important, the water. Plants are the best water filters on earth, so we get the most clean and precious water out of them.
We should not remove it from the plants. It is needed for best digestion, because every plant contains the amount of water it needs for being digested, so dehydrated food deprives the body of his own water.
Furthermore dehydrated food sticks on your teeth and thus accelerates tooth decay.
An other issue is that a electrical dehydrator takes a lot of energy to dehydrate, it has one or more heating elements and one or more fans to assure the circulation of the air.
I’m using the Sedona Digitally Controlled Food Dehydrator (SD-9000) and it uses over 600W with it’s two heating elements and two fans running.
But dehydration has some practical advantages.
Food preservation
You are growing more tomatoes than you can eat? Preserve them in the dehydrator and save them for later.
Just cut your fruits into slices or into halves and put them on your dehydrator trays at about 42°C or 107 F for as long as they need to get as dry as you like them in your climate.
Did you ever try half dried, warm pineapple slices? They are tasting awesome!
Generally the flavor of dehydrated food is more intense due to the lack of water.
Dehydrated fruits also come in hands at hiking for example.
Raw Crackers
Making crackers out of vegetables that would otherwise go bad is my favorite usage of my dehydrator.
I like making crackers with for example broccoli, flax seeds and everything else that has to vanish from the fridge.
I soak the flax seeds in distilled water for a while, blend all the other ingredients at low speed in my Blendtec blender and then add the soaked flax seeds to the mix for some last blending. You get a thick dough out of it which I spread on Teflex sheets.
Then I cut slightly into the spread mass, so I can break the crackers apart when they are done and put everything in my Sedona dehydrator at about 50°C or 122 F. Since the mass is very wet I can go over the “critical temperature” for a while. They get out of the dehydrator faster this way.
After maybe 5 hours I remove the Teflex sheets and put the half dehydrated crackers on the normal sheets. Everything goes back into the dehydrator for another more than 15 hours at 44°C or 111 F (the actual temperature in the Sedona is always bit lower I recognized).
Why staying in the 40°C or 104 F range?
At this temperature the organic and living components are starting to die and get destroyed or modified. That concerns enzymes, vitamins, minerals and other phytonutrients. We don’t want that. We want all nutrient intact and unaltered. At higher temperatures even more chemical reactions are taking place, like the caramelization of simple sugars.
Tools
As I was mentioning, I’m using the Sedona Digitally Controlled Food Dehydrator (SD-9000) and I like it a lot. It has a lot of advantages over other dehydrators, for example the Excalibur, like two separate heating system, a night mode, a see-through glass door and microprocessor controlled temperature management. I will create an own article about the Sedona later.
If you do not have or can’t afford a dehydrator you can also use your oven at lowest temperature if you keep the lid open a bit and let the internal fans running.
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