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
All hail red pepper flakes. I just found out my airfryer has a dyhdrate setting. Perfect for drying up and making a plethora of fresh pepper flakes from the potted pepper abundance
I need a new air fryer. I didn’t know that until just now.
Somewhat tangential but air fryer dehydrate cycles are perfect for draining tofu too. I slice my tofu bricks into tofu sheets, throw them into the air fryer on dehydrate for an hour and a half, and they come out perfectly ready to cook with
New level unlocked… Do you fry or bake or what after?
I usually stir fry after that, or just crumble it up with no extra preparation and add to salads or things that need texture. Dehydrating with the air fryer instead of the normal way leaves a bit of an almost cooked layer on the skin of the tofu, idk that I’d bake it because of that. That being said, it is the lowest possible effort method of dehydrating tofu*. If you have 2 minutes to slice a brick of tofu in 3 sheets and then throw that into an air fryer, try it out and see what you think!
Edit: *in the amount of time I usually plan meals in advance, which was previously never long enough to include tofu in meals
Do you know what the setting actually does?
I was dehydrating some apple slices last week in my standard AF, and it worked quite well. Just took a while to get the moisture out without accidentally cooking them. Maybe the dehydrater setting speeds that process up…?
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.
To be fair its a fancypot. It can crock as well. It sets temp to 200f and timer to 7 hours. I lowered to 190 and didnt quite get a basket of semi fresh habaneros completely crispy. I think I should have left it at the 200 I did slice and de seed them. So yeah not a perfect dry and a very long time running
Well now I’m confused. My apple slices only took 30-40min at ~200°F in my rinky-dink AF, and they’re fairly moisture-intensive.
I’ll have to try it with peppers and see if the times are similar. I guess peppers probably have more moisture, so there’s that.
Yeah i was going for mortar and pestle dry for a ground hot pepper and it wasn’t even enough. By fresh I lent store bought so not sure how garden fresh will fair
