Preserving Everything by Leda Meredith

Author:Leda Meredith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Countryman Press
Published: 2014-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

How to Dry Vegetables

Dried vegetables aren’t just useful to have on hand for winter stews. You can also add them to casseroles, and even baked goods such as zucchini bread. Dried carrots, onions, and celery work just as well as fresh as aromatics when you make soup stocks. And in soup recipes besides stocks, I find dried vegetables are excellent in puréed soups (the texture is a bit off, though, when they are left in whole pieces in most soups). Like all dehydrated foods, dried vegetables have the advantages of being compact, lightweight, and shelf-stable, which means they are easy to travel with and you don’t need electrical power to store them.

The drying times for vegetables can range from as little as 4 hours to as much as 24 hours, depending on how thick the pieces are and whether they are dried with good air circulation in a dehydrator or convection oven, or in a conventional oven.

Whether you are drying vegetables in a dehydrator or in your oven, it is important that air can circulate freely around the pieces of food while they are drying. This means that you want to spread the vegetables out in single layers and without the pieces touching.

Slice or chop vegetables into pieces approximately ¼ inch thick before dehydrating them. For most vegetables, 135°F is a good average temperature.

Before you dry them, you need to blanch many vegetables by briefly immersing them in boiling water. This step destroys enzymes that would otherwise survive the dehydration process. The result is that the vegetables keep their colors and flavors much better. For example, if you dehydrate celery without blanching it first the result is the color of straw. But blanched, celery keeps its bright green hue for well past a year in storage.

To blanch vegetables, bring a large pot of water to a boil. Chop the washed vegetables into pieces between ⅙ and ½ inch thick. Drop the vegetables into the boiling water and leave them there for the amount of time specified in the following chart. Drain them in a colander, then immediately transfer them to a large bowl of ice water or run them under very cold water until they are completely chilled. Drain again before dehydrating.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.