#dehydrator

[morethansalad]

Easy Oven Dried Watermelon (Vegan)

If your watermelon is getting grainy, simply slice it and throw it in the oven! It’s quick, easy, mitigates waste, is the perfect snack, packs tons of watermelon flavor, can easily be made in bulk, perfect for any season, can be throw in granola or trail mix, and even everyday cereal for a flavor punch!

[whatcha-thinkin]

In your opinion, what food benefits most from dehydrating?

grapes -> raisins

plums -> prunes

meat -> jerky

dried pineapple

dried mango

dried apple

dried apricot

banana chips

dried cranberries

sun-dried tomatoes

no [tag] on here? I must rectify this injustice!

all dried versions are inferior to their fresh versions

Voting ended onJan 26

[thestudentfarmer]

2.27.2026

Hello hello 👋

Wanted to share some kitchen stuff ive been doing. My husband on occasion is able to get produce through work. (Stuff the buyer declines for various reasons and would get tossed otherwise)

Now, depending on how the produce looks, sometimes i just end up giving it to our chickens as free chicken feed. But if it looks good, I'll try to use it up in various ways.

This week they had sliced apples, we got 2 bags, but we dont eat a lot a fresh apples. But thats okay, because I know how to process them into different things 😊

This is what I started with. To be honest, i dont actually know how many pounds it is. I was sort of just winging it because originally, I was just going to cook them and turn the whole things into apple leather.

From raw

To cooked below. I added just a bit of water and lemon juice to keep them from scorching on the pans bottom. Medium heat for about mayby an hour- hour and a half. I did put a lid on it to help speed along the process.

Made the house smell very good! I was originally going to add pie spices, but decided not too.

There was water inside the pot, I poured it into a half gallon glass and diluted it to make apple juice. (Though i added a bit too much water, so its a little weaker than it should be.) I forgot to take a pic and it got drank quick! 😅

I used the blender to puree all the apples, saved a jar of apple sauce for snacking

Old peanut butter jars are awesome for fridge storing!

The fresh apple sauce/puree on the dehydrator trays

I did 2 trays as plain and realised i had a few bananas that needed to be used, so pureed them up with some of the apples and made 2 trays of appleXbanana fruit leather too.

The dried fruit leather, this one is the appleXbanana leather, the plain apple is a might lighter and not as sticky.

The remaining apple×banana mix i put in silicone molds and put in the freezer to make a chilly treat for later. Ill eventually get some sticks to make true Popsicles.

Thats it for now :)

🍏 🍽 Happy Gardening and food waste reduction 🍽 🍏

[genderferalwitch]

Adventures in Watermelon

I realized the other day that the household was not eating the watermelon we had fast enough, and rather than let it spoil, I decided to make it into juice.

So... I grabbed some bowls, a colander, a strainer and my food processor.

I had already cut the watermelon up into chunks so I just threw it all into the FP and blended until it looked like the pulpiest juice. Then I poured the slush-like result into the colander. I pressed on that a spoon a little, but mostly I just let it drip. The liquid and pulp that made it through the colander went into the strainer.

The presumably mostly pulp-free liquid, now juice, went into some leftover takeout containers and the like, and in the end I had almost four quarts.

Initially I was planning on composting the pulp, but then it occurred to me, that I could perhaps, make it into something! (I have plans for the rind that I'll be trying soon) After some quick googling, and looking through the booklet that came with my dehydrator (or desiccator, as my mom calls it) I decided to try to make some 'fruit leather'.

After getting my dehydrator out and scrubbing all of the screens and the base, because apparently I never cleaned it after the last time I used it in... December??? I mixed in a TBS of sugar (the watermelon wasn't actually that sweet to begin with, and one of our house is vegan, so no honey) and spread the pulp on the silicon(?) sheet that came with the dehydrator for just this use. I had just under 3 cups of pulp.

Again consulting the booklet, and google I set the temp to 135 F (57 C) for 12 hours and went to bed.

This morning when the dehydrator turned off I let the sheet cool down and the broke it up into bite-sized pieces. I had thought about cutting it up, but that didn't really work. I could have probably forced it, but ehhh, not work it.

I was surprised by how thin the sheet of 'leather' was. I had been worried that it had been too thin! The booklet recommended that I grease the silicon with some oil to make it easier to remove the sheet of 'leather' at the end. I used the tiniest amount of olive oil. I was worried it would make it taste like it.

Final thoughts! The juice is refreshing! I put a tea cup of it on the ancestor altar! The 'leather' is very yummy! I would eat the whole sheet in one sitting, if I could. Yeah there's a fair bit of seeds in this, especially since the label said 'seedless' but if a watermelon grows in my stomach, so be it. It's a lot of work, and the dehydrator has to run for quite a while (using electricity), so it might not be the most efficient, even if it's passive. I wonder if I could freeze up fruit pulp and then dry it out all at once... There's definitely ways to make this less energy intensive, and more effiecient...

As always, I'm somewhat new to this so suggestions and ideas are welcome!

[bumblebeeappletree]

The community cupboard for sharing food, sited on a Brunswick footpath, offers a good clue for what lies in the Seeds Community Garden behind the fence: inclusion, generosity and community.

Seeds is a garden where people living with a disability can connect with the local residents over a shared love of gardening, plants…and a cuppa.

Garden manager Jo Townsend says the garden was a bare patch of lawn nine years ago. Milparinka wanted to turn the space into something more substantial that would enrich the lives of people the service supports.

Garden club runs twice a week for people to garden together and then share food and a drink afterwards.

The garden is run along no-dig and permaculture principles. The goal is for every plant introduced to have multiple uses.

Harvests are recorded for everything that’s picked and in most years a tonne of food is grown here. The harvest is shared among the gardeners but also with the wider community, via food relief organizations and the community cupboard on the footpath.

A soup festival is held every year, which started with wanting to share a few pumpkins and has grown to hosting more than 1,000 visitors.

An exciting new addition is a food-waste dehydrator; a machine that turns vegie scraps into ready-to-go fertiliser over an 8-10 hour cycle. Already 2,000 kg of food has already been diverted from landfill since it was installed. Food waste is collected from local businesses, while the end result is delivered to schools and other community organisations.

Filmed on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country in Brunswick, Vic.

Featured plants:

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum)

[certifiedceliac]

How to Make Sun Dried Tomatoes (in the Sun, Oven, or Dehydrator) (via The Daring Gourmet)

[survivalpreps]

[copperbadge]

Sam - forgive me because I know you’ve talked about this before - what kind of dehydrator do you have? Do you like it? (Do you love it?) I just learned that you can dry summer squash so now I’m looking into dehydrators

I got a Hamilton Beach 5-tray dehydrator! I did a bit of research but not a ton -- what was important to me was that it have a pretty small footprint, and I wanted the trays to be dishwasher-safe.

I like it quite a lot -- it's a huge step up from my first dehydrator, which I got for free from a neighbor and was basically just a heating coil and a fan with some racks attached. This one is digital so you can set both temperature (between I think 120 and 190? Something like that) and duration, so it'll turn off automatically when it's done. The trays are pretty durable and it comes with a mesh insert and a non-porous insert for stuff like herbs and fruit leather. It makes some noise, but not nearly as much as the old one. The only downside is the cord is quite short, so I bought an extension cord that gives me a little more leeway in where I place it. 

I was tempted to get a new toaster oven that had a dehydrator function, but I'm glad I went with a separate machine -- I do enough drying that it really needs to be its own unit, especially since some stuff takes like 18 hours to dry.