eBook

Paperback and Audiobook versions are also available at the bottom of the page!

Look, it's not only about learning how to dehydrate food, you need to know how to do it safely!

Don’t let your produce spoil—dehydrate it! When foods are in season, take advantage of the buy one, get ones and sock them away. Check out the bountiful roadside stands, and visit your local farmers' markets too.

You'll learn just how easy it is to dehydrate food in the comfort of your own home when you read Susan’s book called Easy Food Dehydrating and Safe Food Storage. The best thing? No more food waste!

The book also teaches you how to dehydrate the top 16 vegetables and the top 14 fruits by using a Nesco or Excalibur food dehydrator. It’s easy when you follow Susan’s Six Simple Steps.

When you’ve finished dehydrating your fruits and vegetables, Susan shows you how to safely store your food for long-term storage. Bins, buckets, Mason jars, and bags are the industry standards for safe storage.

After dehydrating, we need to get air-tight containers as listed above. Most often used are various-sized Mason jars for everyday use. For long-term storage, we use food vacuum-sealer bags and Mylar bags.

To keep your dehydrated foods fresh, you need to use oxygen absorbers. As their name implies, they absorb oxygen. This is important to keep mold at bay.

We place the oxygen absorbers inside the bag of food we've just dehydrated, and THEN we extract the air using a FoodSaver vacuum sealing machine.

There are different brands of dehydrators, as you might expect. There are round and square ones - the Nesco brand has both types. Excalibur has square dehydrators. The advantage of going round is the ease of stackability.

You can dehydrate as many trays as necessary, up to eight is recommended. We don’t want to have a "leaning tower" of dehydrated food fall over! The minimum amount of trays to use for a Nesco (round) dehydrator is four. Notice I said minimum. This is to ensure proper air circulation.

The square Excalibur brand models offer 'pull-out trays' - like drawers. You can also omit the upper trays (leave a tray in—close to the bottom—and below that add a shallow tin-foil tray of water). It then becomes a handy bread-proofing machine!

Get your kids involved. They’ll love the action and the sound of the food vacuum sealer. You can buy special bags—or rolls—to place your dehydrated food in. The rolls come in handy when you want to create “just the right size” bags.

Susan's book shares TOP DEHYDRATING TIPS and is available as an eBook or Paperback or AudioBook— Get your copy today!

eBook

paperback

audiobook

Click on an individual image above to go buy it!

Most Popular Methods of Food Preservation

The most popular and common methods of preserving foods to extend their shelf life include:

• Drying/Dehydrating: Removing moisture prevents the growth of bacteria and molds because water activity is too low. Sun drying (raisins) or using an electric dehydrator (fruit leathers, jerky) is popular in homes today.
• Refrigeration/Freezing: Lowering the temperature, both above and below freezing, slows down deterioration tremendously. This keeps freshness and buys more time before spoiling. Refrigerating is the most common short-term preservation.
• Canning: One of the most popular home techniques. Canning uses sterilized glass jars and high heat treatment to kill microorganisms and seal foods in an airtight environment. Acid foods like fruits and pickles can use boiling water while low-acid items like vegetables require a pressure canner to achieve higher heat needed for microbial kill.
• Salting/Curing: An ancient preservation method that works by dehydrating foods and creating unfavorable salty conditions for microbes. Salting vegetables, fish, and meats (to make things like prosciutto) are common.
• Jams/Jellies: Using large amounts of sugar and an acidic environment renders the fruit or juice dense, tasty, and uninhabitable for spoilage organisms. The sugar acts as a natural preservative once concentrations get very high.

Today refrigeration is by far the most common for short-term storage and freezing/canning are popular methods for storing foods much longer term, up to years with proper practice. Sugar, salts, and acid enable practical preservation too in the right recipes and applications.

After reading this list, you can see why I choose to use an electric dehydrator. Time saver! Ease of use!

Before You Go:

If you like the content of this page, as well as others on my site, please give it some love by clicking on the 🩵 in the lower right hand corner. This helps me to keep providing enjoyable and useful content. Thank you!

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Since 1980 Susan's involvement in publishing - in one form or another - led her to write "reviews" of apps and tools related to the publishing industry.

She realized it was time to explain how she published all her books and got them to market. To that end, she created this website to showcase her puzzle books and other fiction and non-fiction books she's written and produced since 2012. Read Susan's story here.

Susan has been featured on the Mother Earth News blog, and on Solo Build It (SBI). Read her first SBI interview and her second SBI interview. This site is hosted by the amazing team at Solo Build It! along with her sister site, Easy Food Dehydrating.

Do you want to send Susan a quick message? Visit her contact page here. She'd love to hear from you!

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