This thread about dehydrating watermelons reminded me that I’ve been thinking about getting a food dehydrator. The Excalibur that kittenblue links to in the above thread is over $200 for the cheapest model that I could find - in other words, well out of my price range.
The Ronco only runs about $40, which is more my speed. But does anyone know how well it works? I’ve never bought a Ronco product before, so I’m not familiar with the quality.
I’m sick of hunting fruitlessly (hah!) for dried fruit without added sugar. When I DO find them without sugar, they’re always they super-special organic kinds and are significantly more expensive than the sugar-added ones. Plus, I want to make jerky! And I think it’ll be fun.
I got one for my birthday. The brand is Aroma - it’s one of those more moderately priced, like the Ronco. So far it’s working great. We’ve made 2 different batches of jerky in it.
On Alton Brown’s Good Eats, he made his own dehydrator. It worked better and he could dehydrate more food. I haven’t tried it yet, but we plan to take a trip to Home Depot (or somewhere) and pick up a couple of box fans, bunjee cords and air filters, since jerky is going to be our snack food of choice over the summer.
I found a great fan page that has pictures of the process!
I forgot to add that Brown didn’t like the regular dehydrators because they dried the food via heat. Very mild heat, but heat nonetheless, and the problem with that is that, mild or not, it cooked the food. That’s not what you want to do with dehydrating. Not generally, anyway. You want to dry with air, not heat, and not through cooking. That’s why he made his own dehydrator.
Neat! I already have a box fan, too. Though my husband might object to removing it from the living room so I can make dried meat.
The only problem with that is that I need to keep the cats away from it (I forsee them trying to chew through the filters to get at the meat), whereas the commercial dehydrators would likely be ignored and I could just use it in the kitchen.
I have one of these It does dry with heat, but I really don’t mind that my beef is both dried and kind of cooked at the same time, it still tastes the way I like and dries quickly.
It has variable temperature control, the low temp is only a bit warmer than a summer day, so I don’t think cooking is a problem when it’s on low. I use the high temp on jerky and low temp on herbs and such.