We Preserve Foods the Natural Way

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Many vegetables also dry well: green beans, green peppers, squash, pumpkin, beets . . . even potatoes and carrots, although these are so easily stored for winter that there's little reason to process them. My biggest problem was with corn, which attracted insects and the neighborhood cats and had to be protected until its sweet milkiness had dried up. (Food can be shielded with cheesecloth or wire screen, suspended above and around — without touching — the edibles.)

Even though vegetables store quite nicely when sun dried, Ole Sol does tend to bleach most green and yellow varieties to an unappetizing gray. For this reason we prefer to dehydrate vegetables indoors. I spread green beans, green peppers, squash and suchlike on trays and set the containers on top of the refrigerator, where their contents dry quite beautifully.

Most vegetables, incidentally, dehydrate faster than fruits. Two days is an average processing time . . . although some, like whole green beans, take twice that long.

Herbs are also best dried indoors. If you have room, you can simply tie them in bundles and hang them in a dry place . . . as a picturesque decoration for your kitchen, perhaps. Since I can't do this in our mobile home, I handle herbs in the same way as vegetables. When the plants have dehydrated, we break, crush, or cut them into small pieces. Most shatter as they're pulled off the stalks or rubbed between our hands . . . but horsetails, for instance, have to be chopped into bits with scissors.

Horsetails? That's right! Not all the fruits, vegetables, and herbs we dry are home grown. My husband and I like to gather as many edibles as possible from the wild . . . and we dehydrate much of what we collect. On foraging trips we carry along an assortment of boxes that nest one inside another, and spread each item we harvest in its own container. Boxes that hold fruit are put in the sun near our camping trailer, while those containing vegetables are placed in the shade under the vehicle or on top of the bunk inside. Often we'll have ten or more different foods sitting around drying at once.

I'd also like to dehydrate some of the fish we catch when we're camping or traveling . . . but haven't been able to so far because problems with cats and flies compel us to oven dry our piscatorial treasures. Relief is in sight, though: We're planning to build a drying box (a frame covered with two thicknesses of fine-mesh screen spaced one-quarter inch apart). This should allow air to circulate around the fish, yet keep the various beasties from reaching them.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print