My New Toy-A Dehydrator

A few weeks ago I had a chance to attend a class on dehydrating.  Since we had produced an abundance of peppers and onions in our garden this summer I was very interested in this.

I had my eye on an Excalibur Deydrator and when I learned this was the item featured in the class I knew I wanted to attend.


I quickly became convinced that I had to have one of these and placed my order.


When my dehydrator arrived I was so excited.  I couldn't wait to try it out.  The Excalibur is great.  It has 9 trays which will hold lots of food.  The fan is in the back so the air is blown across the trays from the back to the front.  This keeps the flavors from mingling and it dries the food quicker.







Another item I saw demonstrated at the class I attended
was this apple corer and slicer. 

This thing is amazing!

All you have to do is push the apple on the spindle, turn the crank and Voila! you have a cored apple cut in even slices.  My grandkids are going to love playing with this.  They will want to eat apples all day long just so they can use the corer.

You can set the corer to peel the apples or leave the peeling on.  I almost always leave the peeling on the apple since that is where most of the vitamins are. 

Another option is to peel the apples and place the peeling on one of the dehydrator sheets.  Once they are dried you can pulverize them in your blender or food processor and use the powder to flavor oatmeal or melted butter.


I started searching the stores for produce on sale.  Thankfully this time of year is a great time for purchasing apples and I bought about 15 pounds.  Then I got to play with both of my new toys.

My husband helped and we cored and sliced apples until we were tired of looking at them.  Then we placed them on the dehydrator sheets.

It takes about 12-14 hours to dehydate the apples but the dehydator costs under $.10 an hour to operate, so it is still a great deal.

We dipped some of the apples in a honey water mix before we ran them through the dehydator.  The dehydrator comes with a book that tells you how to do many of these things.

We sprinkled cinnamon sugar on the other slices before we ran them through the dehydator.

We had a couple of oranges so we put them on one of the sheets and did them at the same time.

I believe we were able to fit about 4-5 pounds of apples in the dehydrator at one time.  I set it up and let it run over night and the next morning the apples were ready.

I have used the dehydrator on peppers, apples, bananas (yum!), potatoes and yams.  Hopefully I will get a chance to make some jerky in the near future!