Care package for a sailor

Younger Daughter (who, as you remember, is in the Navy) is deployed once again. From her overseas duty station, she's now at sea for the next six months. Her internet is understandably spotty during this time – it gets worse the farther from shore they are – so we communicate when and how we can.

Life aboard a ship, I gather, obsessively centers on one thing: food. Frequently Younger Daughter is served "midrats" (midnight rations), meals provided for those who are working nights, and apparently the monotony and indifferent quality are a common complaint.

So a couple weeks ago she happened to see the blog post I put up about dehydrating broccoli and wistfully mentioned she would love some dehydrated broccoli. Younger Daughter is fond of a particular soup she used to make when she was a teenager consisting of noodles and various vegetables, and she thought she might be able to cobble together something similar with ramen noodles, a microwave, and boiling water – if only she had dried vegetables.

Well how can any mother resist that kind of cry for help? Next thing I knew, out came the dehydrators and I was trying my hand at drying a variety of new things.

First thing I did was list the vegetables I had canned up in the pantry. Of them, Younger Daughter especially craved corn. I have lots and lots of corn canned up, but I had never tried dehydrating canned corn. Time to experiment.

I started with seven pints...

...which I drained and rinsed.

I used the fine-mesh inserts on the trays.

I wasn't sure how many trays seven pints of corn would fill up, so I just kept spreading and stacking. Of the twelve possible trays (between two dehydrators), the corn filled eight.

Then I divvied them between the two machines, set them up outside (where the noise wouldn't drive us nuts), set the temperature at 125F, and let them run for eight hours.

It turned out better than I hoped.

Each kernel was golden and perfectly dry, yet somehow chewy (not hard like popcorn). The occasional dark kernel is from corn that was a bit above water-level in the jars when canned up. They're discolored, but otherwise fine.

I put the dried corn into a bowl...

...and turned my attention to another one of Younger Daughter's favorite veggies, cabbage.

Cabbage is certainly not something I'd ever tried dehydrating before, so this was unknown territory. The little instruction book that came with the dehydrator didn't even cover it. But a touch of online research suggested slicing the cabbage thin and drying it at 125F for eight hours.

So I peeled off the outer leaves...

...and sliced it thin.

I cut out the core, since the online source said it's too tough and dense to dry. Makes sense.

Four heads of cabbage filled two large bowls.

Those four heads also filled all twelve dehydrator trays full. In fact, I probably crowded the shredded cabbage on the trays a little thicker than I should have, but oh well.

I set the temp at 125F for four hours, rotated the trays, and set them for another four hours.

It turned out much better than I anticipated. I figured the cabbage would have dried down to thin threads of nothingness, but actually it turned out quite decent and with more substance than I expected. However a few pieces were still "damp," so I separated the majority of dried cabbage into a large bowl, and put the still-damp pieces into a smaller bowl.

I snipped these pieces smaller and spread them on a couple of trays for another hour of drying, which did the trick.

It's worth nothing that dehydrating cabbage makes no sense from an economic viewpoint, unless it's spread out in the sun and dried that way. The amount of electricity we used to run two dehydrators for a total of eight hour (or nine, depending on whether you count the extra drying time) far exceeds the cost of the cabbages. The biggest benefit is feeding a hungry sailor stuck out in the middle of the ocean.

After this it was easy to pull together everything else, since it was already dry. In the end I packed up cabbage, corn, broccoli, garlic, and onions. The corn, onions, and garlic came from our own garden, so it will be truly a taste of home.

I also slipped a box of tea into the care package (she requested tea bags, not loose leaf).

What the heck. There are worse things a kid could ask for than a box of dehydrated vegetables.

In only a few short weeks, this box will find its way to the middle of the ocean. Hopefully the veggies will relieve the tedium of midrats.

Broccoli from here to eternity

As some readers know, broccoli is my all-time, hands-down favorite vegetable. I adore it in every permutation possible.

But it's notoriously difficult to preserve.

I can hear you scoffing. Just freeze it, you're saying! Every grocery store has packages of frozen broccoli.

But decades ago, as a young mother first dipping my toes into food preservation, I tried both freezing and dehydrating broccoli with dispiriting results. I followed the directions meticulously – carefully blanching for the precise amount of time, etc. – and the end product was inedible. Freezing turned the broccoli into a soggy revolting mush. Dehydrating turned it black. Canning isn't recommended at all. Whatever I was doing wrong, it completely turned me off preserving my favorite veggie. I literally went 25 years without attempting to preserve broccoli in any way.

I thought about purchasing freeze-dried broccoli, but it's prohibitively expensive – especially in the quantities I wanted.

Then last summer, a friend with a large garden emailed about how she was so overwhelmed with the amount of broccoli she had grown that she was dehydrating it like crazy. I immediately pounced on her experience.

The issue, apparently, came down to blanching. Blanching is a sacred practice within food preservation circles. It is defined as heating vegetables in boiling water or steam to slow or stop the action of enzymes. It also helps preserve the vegetable's natural color (pretty ironic considering my early blackened results). Blanching also kills mold spores, bacteria, and fungus. I short, there are many reasons to blanch ... except one.

I. Couldn't. Make. It. Work. (At least with broccoli.)

So I turned to my gardening friend, who had enough surplus on hand to experiment with dehydrating both blanched and unblanched broccoli. In her experience, the unblanched dehydrated broccoli was superior in both taste and quality.

Okay, this was heartening news. After a 25+ year hiatus – and freed from the shackles of blanching – I decided to try dehydrating broccoli once more.

So last summer – this was before we moved to our new home – I purchased a three-pound bag of broccoli...

...cut it into small pieces...

...and put them in the dehydrator.

As it turns out, one three-pound bag of cut-up broccoli exactly filled the six trays of my dehydrator.

I set the temperature at 125F for eight hours (per the recommendation of this brand of dehydrator). The results – were terrific!

I mean, look at this! Nice color, good and crisp – just what I'd always hoped dehydrated broccoli would look like. What took me so long to try this?

Plus, that three-pound bag, once dried, compressed nicely into a one-quart jar.

However that's all I got done with regards to dehydrating broccoli. Instead, we got caught up in the pressure of selling our home and moving, frantically preserving the garden produce, etc. Broccoli got put on the back burner.

Fast forward to last week, when I went a little crazy. On a rare trip to the city, I came away with ten, count 'em, bags of broccoli. I reserved two for fresh eating, but had plans to dehydrate the rest.

Once again I went through the chore of cutting everything small.

I cut up two bags' worth at a time since I pressed both our dehydrators into service.

We didn't especially want the house smelling of broccoli, so I set the units up outside.

I dried it at the same temp as before (125F) and for the same amount of time (eight hours), but because the humidity was a bit higher than my last experiment, I had to add two extra hours of drying time (rotating the trays) for a couple of batches to make sure everything was dry.

This time I used some half-gallon jars for storage.

But what does this dried broccoli taste like once it's re-hydrated?

I made a cauliflower stir-fry the other day using re-hydrated broccoli. I used some of the stuff I dried last summer.

I boiled a pot of water, then turned off the heat and added the dried broccoli to it, stirring occasionally.

After 15 minutes or so, it was re-hydrated...

...and I drained it.

After that, I simply added it to the stir-fry like any other cooked broccoli. It tasted great.

I can't tell you how absurdly pleased I am to be able to preserve my favorite vegetable. Broccoli from here to eternity, baby! I can dry as much as I like.

This means that until such time as we get a garden established (next year), I'll always have broccoli on hand.

Dehydrating onions

Boy howdy, did the onions do well this year in the garden.

Now that it's time to harvest, I'm tasked with preserving this abundance. To this end, I decided to dehydrate most of them. Because there are so many onions, I'm harvesting just one bed at a time so I don't get overwhelmed.

I trimmed off all the greens...

...and weighed out 4.5 lbs., which I knew from previous experience is about all my six-tray dehydrator can handle at a time.

Then I started chopping the onions, a very weepy process.

Spreading the onions on the trays. I made sure to use the mesh screen inserts in the trays so smaller pieces wouldn't fall through.

Then -- and this is no joke -- I put the dehydrator outside. Believe me, the smell of onions would have knocked us out of the house otherwise. As it was, the entire yard smelled of onions during the drying process.

The booklet that came with the dehydrator suggested eight hours of drying at 125F. After some experimentation, I bumped it to 135F for ten hours, rotating the trays at the five-hour mark. But still, the onions felt a bit leathery as I peeled them off the mesh. So I consulted my faithful food preservatin bible...

...which recommended pasteurizing the dried onions in the oven at 175F for 10 minutes or so. I upped this to 15 minutes. I was delighted with the results. The pasteurization process took away the leathery texture and made the onions nice and brittle.

Four and a half pounds of onions yields a quart and a half of dried onions.

As I type this, I'm on my third batch of onions and have finished one garden tire's worth of harvest. I'm in for a long haul of drying onions, but when this is all finished, I will have gallons of dehydrated produce. God bless harvest time!

Dehydrating eggs

[The photos in this blog post are numbered since they are potential illustrations for a Backwoods Home Magazine article. This post is also more abbreviated than usual since the bulk of information will be contained in the article]

Over the summer, we had -- to put it mildly -- a glut of eggs. I wanted to find a suitable way to preserve the excess.

(Photo 326)

While there are numerous ways to preserve eggs, for a variety of reasons I wanted to experiment with dehydrating. There are many online references to the ease of dehydrating eggs, but nearly all of them admitted the potential for salmonella. Almost every reference I saw, people dehydrated their eggs at temperatures ranging from 125F to 145F. After some research, we learned that temp is too low, and 160F minimum (I bumped it to 165F to be safe) was necessary to keep salmonella from forming during the dehydration process.

We were in the market for a dehydrator anyway, so I began looking for a machine that achieved that temperature. To my surprise, even the most expensive dehydrators didn't go that high. I had better success with the lower-priced dehydrators and ended up ordering a Presto Digital Electric Dehydrator (model 06301) for about $65 on Amazon. I also ordered fruit roll sheets for each tray, since these are necessary to hold the liquified eggs.

(Photo 743)

Dehydrating is simple. I took five eggs at a time and blended them in a blender for a few seconds...

(Photo 756)

...then poured the liquified eggs carefully on the fruit roll sheet on each tray. The dehydrator came with six trays, which meant I could dehydrate 30 eggs at a time.

(Photo 757)

I set the temperature at 165F for ten hours.

(Photo 759)

At the end of this time, the dried eggs resemble thin peanut brittle, and the color is dark orange. (I learned that commercially dehydrated eggs are "de-sugared" before being dried, which better preserves the color and texture of the original egg.)

(Photo 746)

(Photo 747)

Some people recommend lightly oiling or spraying the fruit roll sheets so the dried eggs will slide off more easily, but I found this is absolutely NOT the case (at least, not with these particular fruit roll sheets). The eggs just slid off.

(Photo 748)

This is 30 eggs' worth of dehydrated stuff. Very compact.

(Photo 749)

I used our mini food processor to grind the dried eggs.

(Photo 750)

(Before)

(Photo 752)

(After)

(Photo 751)

30 eggs came to about four cups of granules. The dehydrated eggs have a "greasy" feel, but this is normal.

(Photo 754)

The next step was learning how well dehydrated eggs performed. To rehydrate, use a 2:1 ratio of water:egg powder. Here's one tablespoon of eggs powder...

(Photo 203)

...mixed with two tablespoons of water. Let it sit for a few minutes.

(Photo 205)

To test the dehydrated eggs in baking, I made two identical batches of cornmeal muffins. Here are the bowls of dry ingredients:

(Photo 208)

Here are the bowls of wet ingredients (dehydrated egg version is always on the left):

(Photo 207)

Ingredients mixed together.

(Photo 209)

Spooned into muffin cups, ready to bake. (By the way, I hope everyone knows the trick of filling any empty muffin spaces with water so as not to warp the pan during baking.)

(Photo 211)

Baked. This is the dehydrated egg version:

(Photo 212)

This is the fresh egg version:

(Photo 213)

Dehydrated version on the left, fresh egg version on the right. They look slightly different in size, but in fact they were almost identical (just my bad photography).

(Photo 214)

Cut open.

(Photo 215)

I couldn't taste the difference. I gave a "blind taste test" to Younger Daughter, and she couldn't tell the difference either. I give dehydrated eggs a "thumbs up" for baking purposes.

But what about direct eating? I scrambled two fresh eggs:

(Photo 219)

And I "scrambled" two tablespoons of rehydrated eggs (4 tablespoons of water):

(Photo 221)

There was no comparison. The rehydrated eggs were absolutely revolting (not to mention half the volume of the fresh eggs).

(Photo 222)

I tried rehydrating the dried eggs with milk instead of water...

(Photo 223)

...and the result was just as bad. MAJOR "thumbs down" for direct eating of rehydrated eggs.

(Photo 224)

Other people claim success in direct eating of dehydrated eggs, but I sure didn't.

Conclusion: Dehydrating eggs isn't worth it if you have to purchase eggs, but absolutely worth it if you have a surplus of your own eggs. But be safe -- don't dehydrate at temps lower than 165F or you risk salmonella poisoning.

I'm storing my dehydrated eggs in the freezer at the moment, but I will also fill some pint jars and use an oxygen absorber and store them in my canning closet, which is cool and dark.