Dehydrating Food: A Beginner's Guide

I have a few raw food cookbooks that call for a Dehydrator, so after purchasing one, I bought this book for some extra ideas!It has some good basic knowledge on the dehydrating processes and some great tips for drying fruit and making fruit leather along with good recipes.But a good chunk of the book seems more interesting in reconstituting food and certainly more than 90% of the recipes are on this topic! The recipes are for things like pea soup - using your dried peas, potato soup using your dried potato. Making a bowl of buttered peas from your dried peas , buttered corn from your dried corn (I think shopping fresh and cooking at once is a healthier and tastier option and never have any intent to dry food for such a purpose..let alone then smother them in butter!!Now if this is what you are looking for this book will be a good find for you - it contains tips and timing for rehydrating foods to get the best out of your cooking. It might be good if you have an abundance of fresh produce from a home garden and need to dry some for use later in the year. In this instance this book is your ideal guide For me however I was looking for good ideas for my dehydrator and my goal was not to dry out all my fresh produce to use at a later time in basic, farmhouse type cooking! I think this book could have been better described in the product detail then I would have know it was not for me.

The book contained really good pictures concerning the topics being discussed. Great recipe ideas on how to use your dehydrated foods.

If you want to learn about dehydrating with a dehydrateor... this book gives you only 62 pages of instruction (the majority of the book is recipes). If you want to sundry or dry via other methods, you get about 3 paragraphs. so look elsewhere. I am disappointed. it literally spent a whole chapter saying that you should buy a dehydrator, and I live in the perfect climate for sundryting, so this is a book for peeps in northern climates only, and have too of time to follow recipes

Easy to understand. Very helpful

This is a good beginners book. Very well written, good pictures and recipes on how to use your dehydrated items. Pretty much a must have in your summer garden kitchen. Enjoy!!

Good book. Lots of ideas and helpful directions for someone who has never done this before or who is just starting out.

Just got a dehydrator and we found it interesting and helpful. We will use it often for advice and recipes

Useful

It's mainly fluff, very little usable info in it that you didn't already get in your user manual with your dehydrator. Half of the book is filled with silly recipes many laden with processed added sugar.. that completely defeats the purpose of why most people will begin dehydrating their own food in the first place!!

I wish I had bought this book BEFORE !!! I purchased the dehumidifier because I think the whole process is so involved and time consuming that I just can't be bothered to do it.I thought it was just "cut up the veg/fruit ....bung it in the device and hey-presto at the end dried fruit/veg like the root crisps one buys in the shops in bags like crisps but no! read the book first its an eye opener.(anybody want an unused dehydrator ??)

Well thought out with lots of very useful charts for at a glance use as well as detailed instructions and recipes

Exactly what I wanted as a first book on dehydrating

Two thirds of the book is recipes that have very little to do with dehydrating. Almost all require baking or grilling. The dehydrating information is basic although thorough.