Sunday, July 11, 2010

Dehydrating.

I have a dehydrator now. I haven't used it yet - tomorrow is going to be the day. I have a day off work and although i'm planning an outing with my kids, given it's school holidays, I'm going to use the dehydrator.
I bought it from a friend who found that it didn't suit her needs. And I confess - I bought it mostly for ONE thing - making roll-ups for the kids.
Kids seem to love roll-ups. they are sugary and tasty and easy to eat and fun to fiddle with. Only the bought ones at the shops have all sorts of added colours and sugars and thickeners and flavours and other things that Master 5 can't eat due to gluten intolerance, and master 7 shouldn't eat, because... well, who needs to eat NUMBERS when one can eat real food!

Anyway, I have made rollups before in a borrowed dehydrator from a friend. So i already know what I'm doing.

I use plums that I preserved in the Fowlers waterbath unit a year or so ago. They are a beautiful rich dark-coloured plum with a nice tart flavour. I preserved some alone in a light syrup, and some with some nashi pears, just in water.

So I drain the fruit in a sieve and use the juice for flavouring in ice-cream or something dessert-related. And the fruit itself gets blended up into a thick puree, poured onto the plastic sheets in the dehydrator (I only have one plastic sheet with this one. I'm going to use baking paper on the rest of the trays. It worked fine last time!) and spread out to an even thickness. Then we switch it on and away we go!

I've not used a dehydrator like this one before - it only has one setting and the fan is on top, not on the bottom. It will be interesting to see how well it works compared to the one I borrowed last time. If it seems to be fine I'll buy some extra trays for it as it's only got 4.

I'll let you all know tomorrow night how it went - hopefully with pictures but there are no guarantees there as our internet is being naughty at the moment.

Ali