She wanted pasta, shrimp, peas, butter and lemon. I had a pint and half of canned San Marzano to use up. If you don’t put red pepper flakes in something like this then you have messed up.
Did you know that frozen shrimp is just a tiny bit more money than ground beef right now?
Cost per person $4.70
I’m picturing that the setting would basically just blow the fan without powering the element.
You definitely need some heat, otherwise it would take days, just blowing a fan on the food.
From what I’m reading online, the special “dehydrator” setting simply cooks as usual, but it sets the heat much lower… I think in the 90°-150°F range, and it does seem to take hours. This leads me to believe that I totally lucked out in my experiment due to apple slices easily being able to take 180°-200°. They were done in maybe 30-40minutes that way.
Next step is for me to experiment with bumping up the heat to see how much faster I can do them without accidently cooking them. 250° proved to be too much, but I’m thinking somewhere around 220-230° could work.
They were delicious, btw… better than store-bought.
Obviously the other factor for some will be cost. The electrical meter is actually right on my floor in an access closet I can unlock. So next time (I’m thinking this weekend), I’ll do another experiment and let you know what the numbers are. I have one of those round $30-40 models, for the record.
It doesn’t take nearly as long as you think. If you remove the stems from most leafy herbs, they can be bone dry in 6 hours tops.
If you leave the stems on it’s going to take quite a bit longer. If you can get the temperature out to 1: l35 most herbs will be completely done even if they have some stems on the leaves and under 3 hours. Beef jerky’s going to take considerably longer and should be done closer to 140.
I have a 10 tray dehydrator with variable temperature setting. Unfortunately something in it has died and it no longer heats. Very sad. And I don’t have the eligible knowledge to fix it.
I also noticed that white mushrooms can completely air dry on their own in maybe a couple days, depending. I just put them in a brown paper bag.
Probably the #1 leafy herb I’d want to dry is cilantro, but a lot of the herb is in fact stem, so go figure. I dried some successfully in my oven, once. *shrug*
I think moisture-intensive stuff like apple slices & similar absolutely need some heat to get the moisture out. I wouldn’t want to try air-drying them, because it would take a long time and there’d likely be rot / mold issues.
That’s too bad about your dehydrator. The electronics shouldn’t be too complicated AFAIK, so maybe looking online for solutions might help. I also use GPT sometimes to help diagnose a problem. It’s a crapshoot of course, but it really has helped me with a bunch of stuff.
I cant stand dehydrated cilantro. Probably a result of having lived in formally Mexico controlled territory. It needs to be fresh.
Apples definitely need heat.
I think I need a nerd to map the circuit board and find the component that’s busted. I saved a wand over all the parts and got voltage from the whole cycle. Odda are it’s a busted resister that’s still passing current.
In truth, dried cilantro turns out remarkably like hay. I guess I could try stuff like Goya’s ‘sofrito in a tube,’ but of course, that stuff’s swimming in salt.
Last time I looked in to growing cilantro in a window garden situation, I read that it needs loads of light, which I’d only be able to achieve with some kind of grow-light setup I don’t have. My big issue is of course mobility.
My problem is that it gets so hot here that it bolts before you get anything usable.