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RichG | 09-03-2006 10:44 AM
Homemade Food Dehydrator Seems like a nice easy thing to build for those who want to try dehydrating out with out going through a lot of expense. Any other home builds here? I want to build mine with high capacity.....:smokin: *Homemade Food Dehydrator* By Stryder 3-24-02 http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo/images/dehyds.jpg If you�re like most survival folks you�ve got a commercial dehydrator or two that you use to preserve foods. Maybe it�s to preserve your garden produce or maybe to make some lightweight backpacking foods at a reduced cost. Whatever use you make of it, it probably looks something like the one pictured above. I have three favorite �survival� food books that I leaf through from time to time. They are: Putting Food By by Hertzberg, Vaughn, and Greene, Cooking in the Outdoors by Jacobson, and my absolute favorite and the one I would pick if I could only pick one food book, Stocking Up by Carole Store. Like many folks, since September we have been very busy double checking our preps and staying close to home �just in case� and we have not had much time to enjoy the outdoors. So the other day I was planning a short weekend camping trip with my family and looking through Cooking in the Outdoors for some new backpacking recipes to try. The recipe I wanted to try called for some dehydrated ground beef and I didn�t have any made up. I went to get the dehydrator to make some and then just decided � what the heck � I�ll make a home made dehydrator first to make the ground beef with. http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo...ehydsstart.jpg The first thing I did was round up what I needed which was a heavy cardboard box (I chose one that a computer monitor had come in), some aluminum foil, masking tape, a light socket and bulb, some lamp cord and an electrical plug, some aluminum cookie sheets, some wooden strips (I chose some stuff in the garage I had used to fix screen doors with this past summer), and my trusty do everything tool � my Kbar. Being a packrat I had all the stuff around the house, it was nothing special and should be easy to find or very cheap to buy. http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo...dehydsfoil.jpg Next I lined the box with the aluminum foil and taped it down with the masking tape. Roll the masking tape into a small loop so that you have the sticky side out and tape the foil to box without the tape showing. After the box is lined with the foil, make up the light socket and connect the lamp cord and plug. http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo...dehydslamp.jpg If the socket you are using is open remember to make a backing for it with cardboard because it should not be in direct contact with the foil lined box after assembly. I used a 150 watts bulb in my dehydrator because it was the biggest wattage bulb I had in the house (don�t even know why I had it!) but it seems to be absolutly right for the size of the box http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo...ehydsstick.gif Mount the finished light fixture into a bottom corner of the box. On two opposite sides of the box measure off and cut holes to slide the wooden slats through that will hold the trays (aluminum cookie sheets) of food to be dehydrated. If you look closely at the picture you'll see that one of the slats has marks on it. I used that slat as a crude measuring stick to be sure I lined up the holes on the sides but without using any tools other than my Kbar. The next step was to load up the trays with the ground beef I was going to dehydrate, plug in my new dehydrator, and let it do its thing. http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo...dehydsmeat.gif About 18 hours later my beef was done and ready to go camping with me. That�s faster than my commercial dehydrator which would have taken an extra 6 hours or so to do those same five pounds of ground beef. My new home-made box dehydrator just sits in a corner of my living room doing its thing. http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo...dehydsdone.gif What is its thing? Well ground beef for one. Just cook up your ground beef (the leaner the better) on the stove the way you normally would. When it�s cooked, drain the fat. Put the cooked beef into a strainer and run a teapot of boiling water through it. The water will drain off most of the grease, which is what causes early spoiling. It will also leach out some, but not all, of the nutrients but none of the taste. Throw it in your dehydrator for a day until it is VERY dry and crumbles into powder when you break it up in your hand. Then you can use it for soups and stews, in sauce and chili in the field. Rehydrate it by letting it sit in a plastic bag with a pint of water per pound for about an hour. It will last about 4 weeks in a zip lock bag, and it lasts a year - from one summer to the next - just sitting on a shelf if it�s vacuum sealed. About 5 pounds of dehydrated ground beef fits into a quart bag (that doesn�t leave any room to add water to rehydrate, however.) Canned kidney beans, with or without the syrup work well too and you�ll need those for the chili. Fruit for a trail snack is easy and a common thing folks think of doing in a dehydrator � bananas are on sale often in the winter, sometimes near me they�re five pounds for a dollar. Grab them up, slice them up in � inch to 3/8 inch slices, brush them with a little honey thinned � and � with water with 1 T. of lemon juice added and you�ll have cheap, great tasting trail snacks. Do up enough to last �till next winter � they�ll keep. Have you got Chilean winter grapes coming into your area stores? How about some homemade raisins to mix with those banana chips? http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo...dehydssoup.jpg What else can you do? Maybe some campfire corn chowder. � cup of dried corn, 4 strips of cooked dehydrated bacon, 1 small onion chopped (can also be dehydrated to save weight and volume), 1 medium potato diced, 2 cups dry milk, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 � teaspoons salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper. Mix the flour, salt, milk, pepper, and onion (if you decide to dehydrate it) together in a ziplock before you go. Rehydrate the corn in 1� cups of water for 30 minutes. Place the undrained, rehydrated corn and 2 more cups of water into a pot and slow boil for 45 minutes. Add water to maintain volume as water boils off. Add potato and cook until tender. Combine the pre-measured milk, salt, pepper, and flour mix to 2 � more cups water and mix well. Add the milk mix to the soup pot, mix well, and add the bacon and onion. Serve with crackers or hard bread. It�s lightweight for packing but big on taste around a campfire. Take 4 pounds of flank, rump, brisket or round steak and trim ALL the fat with a sharp knife then cut into � inch strips about 6 inches long. Marinate in the refrigerator overnight in just enough water to cover mixed with 1 1/3 T salt, 1t pepper, 2 t onion powder, 1 t garlic powder, 1 t Worcestershire sauce, 12 drops Tabasco sauce and � t thyme. Next morning lay it on your dehydrator trays with no overlapping, plug in the dehydrator and when you come home from work that night, 8-10 hours later, you�ll be looking at some fine beef or venison jerky. Meals Rejected by Ethiopia have their place for sure. But with a little practice you can make some very tasty meals in the field from things that don�t have any more weight or bulk than MREs. Dehydrators also greatly add to the storage life and decrease the bulk of some of your storage foods. If you don�t have a dehydrator, you really should have one. This homemade version works as well or better than a commercial dehydrator and shouldn�t cost anyone more than $5 to put together even if you�re buying some of the parts plus an hour or less of labor. If you scavenge an old lamp, a cardboard box, and some tin foil, it costs nothing. Then use it and see the world of difference it makes in campfire meals and pack weight! Then�. Get out and train! Stryder All materials at this site not otherwise credited are Copyright (c) 1996-2002 Trip Williams. All rights reserved. May be reproduced for personal use only. Use of any material contained herein is subject to stated terms or written permission. PS.... only use for personal use :smokin:

sam | 09-03-2006 01:31 PM
Re: Homemade Food Dehydrator solarcooking/ I posted this in another thread. Click on [Plans] Rough plans for a large solar food dehydrator. Solar water pasteurizers. Solar water distiller. dtnwn

electric-amish | 09-03-2006 02:48 PM
Re: Homemade Food Dehydrator Hay Sam I just saw you live in Ventura. I used to live in Camareo and TO. Hope the weather is perfect as always. Electric-Amish Sorry for the Semi Hyjack

sam | 09-03-2006 07:09 PM
Re: Homemade Food Dehydrator J in AZ, and all- For a dozen years, I had a small size Excalibur, which worked great, and never failed, but I wanted more capacity, so I bought a medium one, thinking that I would run both, and have plenty of room. I ended up giving the smaller one away. If you visit the Excalibur web site, clicking Index #7 will take you to the dehydrators. If, like me, you mostly use one to make beef jerky, the medium size is fine, but if you are a serious gardener, I would suggest the large size. When I get around to building a solar dehydrator I will design it to hold the relatively easy-to-clean Excalibur trays. What I want next is an electric wheat grinder, I have a Corona (with stones, and tricky to adjust), a Back to Basics (takes forever), a Country Living (nice but still a lot of work). And a Zojirushi bread maker (pricey but do a usenet search and you'll find out why.) Our oven broke and I never fixed it. Besides the usual, meat, fish, chicken and turkeys, we have been using a propane BBQ grill to bake bread and cook casseroles, .... with a big pizza stone in it, works fine as an oven. My Honey really wants an outdoor wood-fired oven, but I doubt it will ever happen. bakeoven dtnwn

TheSimpleton | 09-05-2006 10:55 AM
Re: Homemade Food Dehydrator What great stuff! I highly recommend the Excaliber as well. It does the work perfectly. But again, if you have a garden, you really have to spring for the big one. You may forget that produce comes in first nothing, then in bushels. The best idea (I haven't tested) is simply tin roofing set on a slope with glass storm windows over it. Open top and bottom. This would be a massive quantity, but may have to be watched to keep from cooking/soaking. This is what used to be done for corn: throw it on the hot tin roof to take the first water out. Thanks for the reqs, looking for something that doesn't need grid electric. Alcohol burner and solar fan? TS

sam | 09-05-2006 12:35 PM
Re: Homemade Food Dehydrator Hi electric-amish (Off topic, but may be of interest to others besides e-amish) I live in Camarillo, Ventura County. Just up the road is Oxnard, which supposedly enjoys the best weather in North America. Also this is the Oxnard plain, which has some of the deepest topsoil in the world. We moved here about 14 years ago, when it still was small townish. We're suffering from urban sprawl now. All the small avocado and citrus groves that were inside city limits are gone. Parking lots are full, instead of mostly empty. But I live in central "Camrio", the older part of town, so my neighbors are great. Los Angelenos are moving into the new upscale communities at the outer edges, it's easy to tell who they are by the way they drive. Still, there is no violent crime here, and truck farms are just a few minutes drive away. Well, there is about a ten acre strawberry patch in town that I can walk to in a few minutes (Santa Rosa & Las Posas). A high school and a library are planned to go in there, I think. I usta didn't like strawberries, now I love them. It is said that those Chanlar strawberries put three kids through college, producing two doctors, and one lawyer. Ventura County, California Oxnard Plain Cheers!

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