Using a food dehydrator is an easy and quick way to dry, preserve and store foods. Some of the advantages of dehydrating with a food dehydrator, versus canning or freezing include:
- Dehydrating is not as difficult or time intensive as boiling, pressurizing and canning food.
- Improper canning can carry high food safety risks. Botulism is a serious and sometimes deadly form of food poisoning that occurs from improper sterilization and canning.
- Canning typically involves food blanching and sterilization at high temperatures. This causes large vitamin and mineral losses versus dehydrating and freezing.
- Freeze dried food is expensive while freeze drying equipment can cost thousands of dollars. Using a standard freezer is an easy preservation method, however, this requires ample freezer space.
- Dried food shrinks and becomes lightweight as its water content is reduced. Versus canned and frozen food, dried food storage is easy and not space intensive. Further, lightweight, dried food is easy to transport.
- Unlike frozen foods, dried foods can be eaten as is without any special cooking or preparation. This makes dried foods, like beef jerky and dried fruit, ideal as a stored, emergency food supply and great as a traveling food supply for campers, hikers, hunters, athletes and other outdoors enthusiasts.
- A food dehydrator is simple to operate. Simply place sliced foods onto the drying trays and turn the dehydrator on.
Published 9/3/2009 12:00:00 AM
Tags: Blanching, Emergency Food Supply, Water Content