Dehydrator

Last week while doing some errands and popping in to Rainbow Foods, I cam across a nice looking dehydrator. I needed a new one, as my previous one was borrowed and no longer with me. To be honest I wasn't overly happy with the previous one, as it was one of the round ones with a big hole in the middle. It just wasn't suitable for the applications I wanted to use it for at the time. Mainly I wanted to make fruit and vegetable based sheets to roll up various ingredients. The hole in the middle proved too daunting to overcome.
So when I saw this flat tray style unit with 6 trays and under $200, I was sold. Right from opening the box we put it to use. I started with some grape tomato halves for a garnish to a bite for the following day. Worked perfect. What next? Well as part of my cravings yesterday, I really needed to make some beef jerky. I had cleaned up a tenderloin the day before for some of our bites, and had a bunch of trim and the "chaine" to use up. Why not slice up what I could and dehydrate it. Not wanting to just use salt and pepper, I rubbed half with our BBQ spice blend and the other got a marinading in soy, garlic, ginger, and chili sauce.
Into the dehydrator it went and about 6 hrs later the dry rubbed beef was done. It took another couple for hours for the marinaded beef to be ready.
Today I am going to raid my neighbors chili garden. They have been drying on the stem for a few weeks now, and if not picked will rot in short order. She has some great chilis to work with and drying them just let's us use them for the rest of the winter.
This unit has worked flawlessly so far. Coming up this week we are going to work funkier applications such as; green tea and yuzu sheet for wrapping up ginger spice cake. And perhaps some savoury vegetable sheets for a new take on Nori and sushi making. We shall see where it all goes. But new equipment usually inspires some new directions and ideas.