Drying and storing food

[77bawls]

I'm sure some of you dehydrate food. I want to see some pics of your dehydrators. Especially if they are home made with box fans ans such.

Something a little more obscure would be freeze drying your own food. How many of you have done this?

[PONY_DRIVER]

RE: Freeze drying

Everything I've read, which is very little, points to a sizable cost and a lot of time, space, and dedication.

You end up freezing the food, then heating the tray it's on, while applying a vacuum to the freezer. Make everything food grade and the $$$$ ads up. If you find a cheap solution to all that please let me know!


I have a cheapo $20 box store dehydrator and a slightly better $40 BPS version. They're round and have about 4 trays each. They do alright for the little but of stuff we've ever dehydrated. Haven't tried jerky in forever.

[77bawls]

Originally Posted by PONY_DRIVER

You end up freezing the food, then heating the tray it's on, while applying a vacuum to the freezer. Make everything food grade and the $$$$ ads up. If you find a cheap solution to all that please let me know!

There is no heat involved. The vacuum boils the water in the food drying it out. I already have a vacuum pump all I would need is the chamber. I was thinking of a steel box with a bolt on Plexiglas lid. The food would only need to be on a stainless try to be foodsafe.

[PONY_DRIVER]

1. Freezing: The product is frozen. This provides a necessary condition for low temperature drying.
2. Vacuum: After freezing, the product is placed under vacuum. This enables the frozen solvent in the product to vaporize without passing through the liquid phase, a process known as sublimation.
3. Heat: Heat is applied to the frozen product to accelerate sublimation.
4. Condensation: Low-temperature condenser plates remove the vaporized solvent from the vacuum chamber by converting it back to a solid. This completes the seperation process.

[77bawls]

Heat isn't required, it's used to shorten the process.
You don't need to condense the gasses either. Under a vacuum the temp can't stay cold forever, eventually it will heat up to room temperature.

[Spork]

My folks have one it looks like this one
http://www.amazon.com/Nesco-American...ies/B001795P4O
(not sure if this is the model but it looks similar)
Seems to work well, they usually do apples, grapes, and jerky in it.

If I were building one I would probably build something for an enclosure and use a case fan and power supply for the fan. something like this: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=268

of course a real tech-redneck would just make a tray he could stick in the case and dehydrate while he surfed pirate...

[Mo]

I've got an Excalibur 9 tray.

seems all we ever use it for is making apple chips.

[77bawls]

I have that exact webpage open. lol

It doesn't really say how it works tho. I see that it's cross draft but that's about it. How does it work?

[Red Dwarf]

About 30 years ago, I built a dehydrator that worked okay.

A plywood box roughly 12"x12"x30" high. Hinged plywood door on the front. Small sliding door on the top. The heat source was a Edison-base cone heater in a ceramic light socket. I had a friend that owned a plastic container store who gave me a bunch of lids for the square 5-gallon buckets for free. Drilled many holes in the lids. Attached some cleats to support the lids.

It was difficult to control the heat with the sliding door. Some window screen would have made better trays. Thinking about it now, it needed a rheostat (light dimmer switch?) to control the heat better and different shelves. Actually for all the effort, I could buy one at Costco for less that would work better. Back then, finding a dehydrator in a store was pretty unusual so this was a good project for the time.

[zukitough]

I use a cheapy Walmart dehydrator. My meat slicer is probably 4x the cost of the dehydrator. Irony. Anyways, Alton Brown made a jerky/fruit dehydrator out of a box fan and some furnice filters.

[Red Dwarf]

Originally Posted by zukitough

Anyways, Alton Brown made a jerky/fruit dehydrator out of a box fan and some furnice filters.

Caught my interest so I found this:

http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/Seaso...eringbites.htm

It has the transcript and Youtube of the show about fruit. I like his logic and the idea.

Here is the transcript for the jerky show - no video on this one.

http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/Seaso...trans.htm#4000

[zukitough]

Originally Posted by Red Dwarf

Caught my interest so I found this:

http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/Seaso...eringbites.htm

It has the transcript and Youtube of the show about fruit. I like his logic and the idea.

Here is the transcript for the jerky show - no video on this one.

http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/Seaso...trans.htm#4000

that system uses no heat so the product is still uncooked yet dry

[Norm]

I've been looking at putting a bit more food back in long term storage. I'm going to bag some rice,split peas, beans, etc using mylar bags, dry ice to purge the oxygen, and some oxygen absorbers. Things like fruit and veggies I'm going to just buy 10lb can's of sealed and freeze dried.

[Red Dwarf]

Originally Posted by zukitough

that system uses no heat so the product is still uncooked yet dry

True. He did talk a little about preservation because of this. On one hand, not cooking the fruit and veggies will leave a higher quality end product (IMO) but does add some issues for long term storage.