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One thing I do for my long-term dehydrated foods is make opaque sleeves for the mason jars to help block the light when they are on the shelf. It's nice and colorful to see all the food in the clear jars, but sunlight damages food and reduces the nutritional value. It's a shame to spend time and effort putting up food just to have it deteriote.
I compromised and used colored construction paper and cardstock the same colors as the contents. I cut the paper to fit, wrote on the contents, and left a thin gap (about 1/2") so I can still see the level in the jar rather than overlapping the ends. A few dots of regular Elmer's white glue keeps the sleeves in place and it comes off easily if I ever need to use the jars for water/pressure canning. For my 1/2" gallon jars that I won't ever use for water or pressure canning, I laminated the sleeves so they last longer. I put all the jars so the solid part that I've written the contents on is facing out toward the light and the level-viewer slit is in the back in the shade. Of course, if you're the arts-n-crafts type, you could decorate your sleeves with patterned scrapbook papers, photos, stickers or graphics so you don't have to sacrifice any food beauty in your pantry
For my overstock, I normally vacuum seal them in mylar bags the same size as my pantry jars, and keep the sealed bags in gamma-lidded buckets out in the larder. That way it's really easy to refill my pantry jars when they get low and I don't have to worry about spoilage so much. I used to keep my overstock in jars stored in boxes, and swapped out the whole jar, but one earthquake and dozens of busted jars and lost food made me rethink that strategy!
Anyway, I dug around my garden journals and found some notes on the different dehydrators I've used in different places that I lived. Basically, the convection-only stacked towers in the lower price ranges didn't work well in year-round very humid areas (NC, SC, GA & LA) although they did alright in other mildly humid places as long as I didn't use them during the wet season. For the very humid places, the fan models were the only ones that worked, and the Excalibur with the horizontal airflow worked about 25% better (faster, dryer and less losses) than the Nesco with vertical airflow.
In the arid places I lived, I found just letting food air-dry in racks was about the same speed and dryness as any of the electric models unless it was particularly cool. The flavor and color was actually a bit better with the straight air-dry since there was less heat & oxidation damage. Using a solar dryer in these climates was really fast, but I had to be careful not to overdry or overheat the food. In some cases, I reached brittle dry in an afternoon and a full day was too long (herbs and greens) resulting in heat damage and oxidation.
How long does dehydrated food last? Fruits & veggies? Thanks
How long does dehydrated food last? Fruits & veggies? Thanks
Veggies & herbs that are sliced thin or diced small and then completely dried until they are brittle can last up to 5 years if stored in an airtight container. (Technically, they can last much longer than this provided the seal is unbroken, but they may begin to lose some nutritional value)
The only exception is tomatoes (which, botanically, are fruits anyway), they never really dry all the way to brittle. But if you dry them past leather dry, so they crack when you bend them instead of breaking (brittle) or flexing (leather), they can last about 1 year. I'd extend this rule to cucumbers, squash, eggplant and zuchinni as well just to be safe.
Most fruit has such a high water content that you can't get them much drier than leather dry. Fruits dried to leather dry can last 6 months to a year. The only exceptions are very thinly sliced apples and some small berries which can be dried past leather but not brittle, and they can last up to 2 years but should be checked for mold every few months after the first year.
Jerky (from raw meat) has a high water content and a high fat content, and should generally be consumed within 3-6 months before it begins to mold or go rancid. Cooked meats that are dried still have a high fat content, but will generally last 6 months to a year before going rancid, especially if you rinse as much grease off it as you can before drying it. Needless to say, you should trim as much visible fat off any meat you intend to dehydrate. (There's a whole other process for long term curing and drying of raw meat). Do NOT vacuum seal dehydrated meat, especially jerky, because it is a high risk for botulism in an anaerobic container... add a dessicant pack, but not an oxygen absorber to a jar with a tight lid.
But, if you regularly eat out of your pantry, nearly everything you dehydrate in the fall will last you through the winter and into spring when new stuff starts coming in fresh from the garden.
Veggies & herbs that are sliced thin or diced small and then completely dried until they are brittle can last up to 5 years if stored in an airtight container. (Technically, they can last much longer than this provided the seal is unbroken, but they may begin to lose some nutritional value)
The only exception is tomatoes (which, botanically, are fruits anyway), they never really dry all the way to brittle. But if you dry them past leather dry, so they crack when you bend them instead of breaking (brittle) or flexing (leather), they can last about 1 year. I'd extend this rule to cucumbers, squash, eggplant and zuchinni as well just to be safe.
Most fruit has such a high water content that you can't get them much drier than leather dry. Fruits dried to leather dry can last 6 months to a year. The only exceptions are very thinly sliced apples and some small berries which can be dried past leather but not brittle, and they can last up to 2 years but should be checked for mold every few months after the first year.
Jerky (from raw meat) has a high water content and a high fat content, and should generally be consumed within 3-6 months before it begins to mold or go rancid. Cooked meats that are dried still have a high fat content, but will generally last 6 months to a year before going rancid, especially if you rinse as much grease off it as you can before drying it. Needless to say, you should trim as much visible fat off any meat you intend to dehydrate. (There's a whole other process for long term curing and drying of raw meat). Do NOT vacuum seal dehydrated meat, especially jerky, because it is a high risk for botulism in an anaerobic container... add a desiccant pack, but not an oxygen absorber to a jar with a tight lid.
But, if you regularly eat out of your pantry, nearly everything you dehydrate in the fall will last you through the winter and into spring when new stuff starts coming in fresh from the garden.
My compliments on this post. You have a knack for presenting lots of good information in to-the-point, compact form, without all the fluff. You need to write a "Country Living"-like book... it would be 1/8th the size of Carla Emery's with 8 times the information.
Veggies & herbs that are sliced thin or diced small and then completely dried until they are brittle can last up to 5 years if stored in an airtight container. (Technically, they can last much longer than this provided the seal is unbroken, but they may begin to lose some nutritional value)
The only exception is tomatoes (which, botanically, are fruits anyway), they never really dry all the way to brittle. But if you dry them past leather dry, so they crack when you bend them instead of breaking (brittle) or flexing (leather), they can last about 1 year. I'd extend this rule to cucumbers, squash, eggplant and zuchinni as well just to be safe.
Most fruit has such a high water content that you can't get them much drier than leather dry. Fruits dried to leather dry can last 6 months to a year. The only exceptions are very thinly sliced apples and some small berries which can be dried past leather but not brittle, and they can last up to 2 years but should be checked for mold every few months after the first year.
Jerky (from raw meat) has a high water content and a high fat content, and should generally be consumed within 3-6 months before it begins to mold or go rancid. Cooked meats that are dried still have a high fat content, but will generally last 6 months to a year before going rancid, especially if you rinse as much grease off it as you can before drying it. Needless to say, you should trim as much visible fat off any meat you intend to dehydrate. (There's a whole other process for long term curing and drying of raw meat). Do NOT vacuum seal dehydrated meat, especially jerky, because it is a high risk for botulism in an anaerobic container... add a dessicant pack, but not an oxygen absorber to a jar with a tight lid.
But, if you regularly eat out of your pantry, nearly everything you dehydrate in the fall will last you through the winter and into spring when new stuff starts coming in fresh from the garden.
Thank you, awesome post, info., tips, etc.!!!
I hope you win the most informative poster contest, you deserve it! Cheers!
Smoking meat is a form of low temperature cooking, and by using a salt brine as part of the process you remove moisture from the meat before the smoking process cooks out the fats and evaporates the moisture giving you a long term preserve if the meat is hung in a cool dark dry place. Think Bacon.
Dry cures using salt and sugar work well too for larger pieces of meat like hams.
Any time you use a salt process you should not use an iodized salt, and for dry cured meats you should normally soak the meat in water overnight, and change the water to fresh for a second soak, and sometimes a third before you cook/eat it to wash out some of the high sodium content.
Thanks ChrisC, I used to be a technical writer in a past life, I guess it still shows. Carla had so much great info, I don't think I could top her... but maybe I could edit the Enc. down into a condensed version for folks who don't enjoy the "fluffy stuff" and just want "the meat".
Countrylv2 - thanks for your appreciation. Don't know if I'll win one of the contests or not, but the prize $ would about cover the building materials for a new chicken coop
MTSilvertip - thanks for posting some meat curing links. Raw and cooked meat and sausages can definitely be preserved long-term without freezing or canning by salting, sugaring, fermenting, pickling, curing, smoking, drying, and/or larding... but I wanted to point out that it's outside the scope of a regular food dehydrator, or at least that there are way more steps to it than for simple short-term jerky. I'm still amazed at how effective the older techniques are at preserving foods considering that they didn't even know there were germs back then, much less how they worked and what you needed to do to defeat them! It just goes to show what generations of trial & error and incremental improvements can accomplish!
Some recipes for dehydrated foods call for brining (soaking food in a weak salt water solution) the food before dehydrating, but don't explain why this technique is important and how it affects the subsequent dehydration process... which can lead to some very unsatisfying results.
Firstly, "brining" shouldn't be confused with "salting". Most brines used in cooking and dehydrating recipes have a much lower salt concentration than preserving brines or packing a food in salt. The concentration of salt makes a HUGE difference to what's going on with the food in question. For the sake of discussion, when I mention "brining", I'm talking about soaking a food a weak salt solution. Even if a strong salt solution is called a "brine", I consider this "salting" because the reaction, result, and purpose is different.
Brining a food before dehydrating is recommended for some foods to improve flavor and texture, and to slow/stop the natural enzyme ripening (which can also be done with blanching). The salt in the brine doesn't directly preserve the food, but it does improve the quality of the food preserved by other means. However, soaking food in brine will INCREASE the amount of water in a food (here's why)... which means it will take longer to dehydrate. The end product usually has some superior quality, but the additional dehydration time needs to be managed and taken into account.
*Note: this is also why brining is recommended in many pickling (preserving in an acid solution) and fermentation (preserving with lactic acid produced by microorganisms within the food) recipes. In these instances, the preservation mode is altering the pH, making it too acidic for microorganism to grow; whereas dehydrating and salting removes the water, making it too dry for microorganisms to grow.
Salting is a form of chemical dehydration... the strong salt solution outside the cell membrane draws water out of the cells (osmosis). This is a very lengthy process, taking days or months depending on the food. Salting, either heavy brine or dry packing, results in food being WAY too salty to consume without soaking in fresh water first. Salting is a preservation method of it's own, and can also be used in conjunction with other methods (most commonly nitrate curing and smoking).
Newbie dehydrators often have poor results with recipes that call for brining first. They get discouraged because the food takes so much longer to dry that they think they're doing something wrong, or that the food begins to mold before drying is complete (or molds quickly afterwards because it didn't get dry enough). I'd recommend newbies stick with blanching recipes rather than brining recipes until they become more familiar with their dehydrator and how it performs in their climate. So, don't go out and make jerky first thing, since nearly all palatable jerky recipes call for brining (or marinating, which is essentially the same thing).
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Thank you so much!
Cheers!
