Dehydrating Food

[Marie_R]

Hi everyone. Been talking to people "on the road" in the last few months and had some suggestions that dehydrating is a good way to carry and store fruit and vegetables when travelling (saves trouble with quarantine regulations too).

My first thoughts are that it would be less weight to carry and take up less space than tins or fresh, I could pack in meal-size portions to suit us. A lot of the places we go to are remote and we need to carry enough food for about 2 weeks, with little access to good fresh food in the villages where we sometimes have to shop.

Does anyone have any first hand experience on this subject? What sort of machines; what works/what doesn't with food; do you find it practical, economical, food quality, etc, etc.....

Regards, Marie

[robcaz]

Hi Marie,

We have had a dehydrator for a number of years & used it a fair bit when we did a lot of bushwalking. It has tiers in it so you can dehydrate a fair bit at once & also has a flat sheet for making rollups.

We have dehydrated a lot of fruit like strawberrys when they are on special, sliced bananas etc. Mangoes make fantastic rollups. We also dehydrate pieces of mangoes when our son brings home a few boxes at Christmas. We store them in air tight jars & then add to ice cream over winter. The water content is gone, but the sweetness remains.

Also we tried it on different vegies with carrots coming up good. There is not much left of broccoli though.

Have a chat with Carol at the next get together you attend.

[Marie_R]

Thanks Rob, hopefully I'll get to a weekend meet and talk to Carol about it in more detail. We we're just home after 3 months "on the road" and getting all the red dust cleaned out of everything before we go down to Melbourne in September.