Canning and Preserving For Dummies (51 page)

Chapter 18

Drying Vegetables for Snacks and Storage

In This Chapter

Choosing the best vegetables for drying

How to dry vegetables

Creating tasty veggie snacks

Drying foods is a super way to store a large amount of food in a surprisingly small space. If you are short on pantry space or lack more than a small freezer in the kitchen, drying may be the perfect storage solution for you.

In this chapter, you find out how to choose the bestvegetables for drying, what they look like, and how they appear when fully dried. You will be able to mix and match your family’s favorite vegetables and create easy to store and use vegetables for your pantry.

Note:
The per serving nutrition analyses in this chapter represent the nutrition information for the food
before
it’s been rehydrated. Once rehydrated, the vegetables plump up again and the quantity at least doubles.

Your Vegetable-Drying At-a-Glance Guide

Traditionally, drying meant using the sun’s warmth and a lot of time. You would bring in the screen-covered trays at night, before the cool night air could cause condensation. Flies and other wildlife were a cause for concern, and you had no way to know whether airborne bacteria were present until you ate the food and got sick because of it. Of course, you can still dry foods that way, but there are easier ways: in an oven or with a dehydrator (refer to Chapter 16 for a basic explanation of these drying methods).

For vegetables, a food dehydrator is your best bet because a controlled, clean heat combined with constantly moving air results in a completely dried vegetable. To use a dehydrator, you simply layer your vegetables onto stacked trays and turn on the unit. Some dehydrators have fans that blow the warmed air over the drying food. Other units have a heating element at the bottom, and as the warm air rises, it filters through all the trays, drying the produce in the process. If you’re serious about drying vegetables, look for one that has both a fan and heating element, as well as a thermostat that you can set at just the right temperature.

Drying know-how

Although drying seems pretty, well, cut and dried (pick the freshest vegetables you can find, prepare them as necessary, and put them in a food dehydrator for the required time and temperature), you can ensure that you’ll end up with a tasty, edible veggie by following some basic rules:

Not all vegetables need to be peeled before drying. Leaving on clean, washed skin increases the final nutritional content. Peels often contain fiber and other nutrients that only add to the overall benefit of the vegetable. You can find the best prep method in the drying instructions.

While your vegetables are drying, switch the trays around to ensure they all get even heat. For best results, be sure to cut all the food into evenly sized pieces and spread the pieces in a thin layer on the drying trays.

Some vegetables dry faster than others due to the water content of the vegetable while fresh. When setting up your trays, don’t mix juicy vegetables with those that are drier.

Vegetables with different water content can have much different drying times. If you dry them all together, you can end up with mildew because some may not get completely dehydrated.

Make sure the vegetables are completely dried before sealing. To know that, you need to know what a properly dried vegetable looks and feels like. Not all are crispy when dried. Often, a vegetable is dried properly and yet remains pliable. (You can find out how to tell whether a vegetable is properly dried in the vegetable-specific sections that appear later in the chapter.)

The drying process involves many factors: moisture in the food that is being dried, the accuracy of the thermostat in the dehydrator, how full the trays are, and the humidity on the day you are drying. You may have to experiment a bit to figure out what works best. The drying process is not as accurate as other methods in this book, like canning and freezing. The final goal is to remove enough moisture so that organisms that spoil food cannot grow.

Storing and using your dried produce

When you take the vegetables from the dehydrator, they’re ready to be stored in an airtight container in a cool, dry place out of direct sunlight.

For best results, store batches of vegetables together, but keep them in separate containers. For example, keep all dried tomatoes in a gallon jar, but inside the jar, divide them into separate storage bags, with each bag holding tomatoes dried on different days. This way, if something isn’t quite right about a particular batch of vegetables, your entire season’s storage isn’t ruined.

You can store dried vegetables for up to a year as long as they are kept dry and out of sunlight.

Dried vegetables can be used for snacking and adding to soups and stews in the last few minutes of cooking. To rehydrate your dried vegetables add 1 1/2 cups boiling water to 1 cup of dried vegetables. Let them stand for 20 to 30 minutes to absorb the water. If all the water is absorbed and they’re not as plump as you’d like, add about 2 cups additional water and let them stand until most of the water is absorbed. Use the vegetables as you would raw ones; cook them or add them to a soup or stew. A good rule of thumb is 1 cup of dried vegetables equals two cups of reconstituted vegetables.

Avoid pouring or sprinkling vegetables over a steaming pot, straight from the storage container. Doing so can cause the moisture from the steam to condense in the container and promote mold. Always pour dried vegetables into a separate dish or your hand before adding to your recipe.

Signs of trouble: Good vegetables gone bad

Although it doesn’t happen often — especially if you follow instructions carefully — sometimes your vegetables don’t dry properly. Or maybe they dried all right, but something happened during storage. Here are the warning signs for dried vegetables that aren’t safe to eat:

Black or brown specks suddenly showing up on food.
This is mildew on the surface that can make you sick.

Moisture building up inside the storage container.
Whether you store your dried produce in a bag or glass jar, no moisture should
ever
be inside the container, even when the food’s been stored for a long time.

An off odor to the vegetables.
You can detect this when first opening the storage container or by holding a handful of vegetables up to your nose and sniffing. This is a sign of mildew, due to moisture being present.

Vegetables sticking together after being stored.
There should not be any stickiness to the vegetable pieces when stored; they should remain loose and easily separated throughout the storage life.

Drying Common Vegetables

Having dried vegetables in your pantry makes good sense. They are quick to fix, and they let you keep that summer-fresh flavor year round. Dried vegetables take up much less room, too, than their nondried counterparts. Your family will marvel at these fresh-tasting foods when the snow is flying!

The recipes in this section assume you have an electric dehydrator with an adjustable temperature gauge. If your dehydrator doesn’t have a thermostat, check your vegetables periodically for doneness and evaluate their appearance, using the information in the recipes as a guide.