Culinary Types: Dehydrated Food

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Dehydrated

No, I’m not talking about my skin, although the Polar Vortex has certainly caused a lot of drying and flaking. At the moment, I bear a striking resemblance to a lizard.

Actually, this is about one of the oldest techniques for preserving food. I’d never thought about dehydrating, but while working on an upcoming story for Edible Long Island, I was talking with Chef Philippe Corbet and Chef James Orlandi, co-owners of Roots Bistro Gourmand in West Islip about New Age gastronomy techniques. We chatted about sous vide, and I mentioned dehydration.“That’s been around for years,” said Chef Corbet, “but people should be using it more.”

Corbet is right. Dehydration is an age old – in fact, ancient – technique for preserving food. My first memories of dried food are tied to camping trips and the moon shots. I start to do a little research, and I soon learned that I could be looking at a technique that might help me preserve more of the harvest from Restoration Farm.

I’ll be honest. My track record as a CSA member is pitiful. While I cook a lot of vegetables, and consume much raw, I’m often not on top of the huge amount of food I bring home. I’m ashamed to admit that a certain percentage goes to waste. So I’ve been spending the cruel, cold winter researching ways to preserve more. Canning is one option that I’ve gotten quite good at, and the conversation with Corbet and Orlandi pushes me towards a little experiment in dehydration. Who knew there were home appliances that could tackle this challenge?

Now, some will ask if I really, really, really need another home appliance for the kitchen? Let’s face it – it’s my art, and kitchen appliances are my paint brushes. So, in a nanosecond, I have purchased the Nesco Gardenmaster Food Dehydrator & Jerky Maker.

It kind of looks like a Lunar Module – and I may need the assistance of NASA to figure out where I’m going to store it. The device consists of several layers of mesh trays topped off with a fan and a temperature control setting. The Gardenmaster can be programmed for different times and temperatures, and the fan circulates air down over food that is layered in the trays, eventually dehydrating the fresh food.

February – being the longest month of the year – is a good time to practice. So I purchase apples, carrots and zucchini so I can start rehearsing for the summer months. You need a bit of space for a Gardenmaster, and it can sound like somebody’s running a hairdryer for hours on end.

Carrots take about six hours to dehydrate. Here’s the before shot, which begins with carrots sliced a ¼ inch thick, that have been steam for three minutes prior to dehydrating.

The transformation is startling. What were once disks of fresh carrot, now look like the cubes in a packet of Cup A Soup.

Zucchini also shrinks considerably. Here’s the fresh zucchini.

Here’s the result after seven hours of dehydration.

While I neglected to take a “before” picture of the apples, here’s the result after six hours of dehydration.

So here are some initial impressions. Four zucchini shrink down to about a cup of dried zucchini chips. The shrinkage for carrots is even more dramatic. I will need to better understand the ratio between fresh food and dehydrated food, in order to effectively plan recipes.

For apples, the size stays somewhat the same, eventually achieving a soft, leathery appearance. The taste is intensely apple, probably due to the concentrated sugars. The carrots, too, taste very “carroty” because of the high sugar content.

So, what will I do with all this dehydrated food? Well, the apple rings will make tasty snacks, and the carrots and zucchini can be tossed into soups and stews.

And, there’s an interesting cookbook called “The Dehydrator Bible” by Jennifer MacKenzie, Jay Nutt & Don Mercer, that contains over 400 tasty recipes using dehydrated foods. The liquid in the recipes rehydrates the food. But, that is for another post.