When you’re getting your food preps in order, a food dehydrator can be very useful and purposeful. There are a number of foods you can store that will have a long shelf life and be able to sustain you during a grid down scenario or whatever reason you are preparing for. Having an abundance of food is key for survival, but having a variety or selection of foods you can eat can make things more tolerable for you when times are very tough.
You might wonder what the difference is between freeze drying and dehydrating. Honestly, there isn’t a lot of difference, and the differences are hard to describe at that. Some foods taste better freeze dried and some foods taste better dehydrated. Another difference is that you can re-hydrate your dehydrated foods, which is something that differentiates the type of food you can prepare with a dehydrator versus a freeze drier.
What Kinds Of Survival Foods Is A Food Dehydrator Good For?
Possibly the coolest thing I’ve discovered to make in my food dehydrator so far is bacon jerky. I like jerky and I love bacon, so I plan on making a lot of this! I’m sure many of you have noticed that bacon is very filling. Sometimes when I’m in a rush, I heat up some precooked bacon strips in a frying pan for a couple minutes and take them with me on a paper towel as I head out the door. This usually satiates me for a few hours until my next meal. Bacon jerky is a definite must have for me.
Homemade fruit leather can be a satisfying snack and something to give you some quick energy if you need a good pick me up. I’ve tried making some of this and I liked it quite a bit better than the fruit roll ups I remember eating as a kid.
The most important reason to get a food dehydrator by far in our opinion is to make pemmican, the King of survival foods. You could also potentially use the sun to dehydrate the ingredients for pemmican, but for some of us that is only feasible 3 months out of the year. It will take a long time too, much in the way sun dried tomatoes take a long time under a powerful July or August sun. With a dehydrator, you can make pemmican much more easily and quickly, and any time of year.
For the life of me I can’t seem to get dehydrated bananas right, so if any of you figure that one out please contact us and give us some pointers! I’ve had great success with mushrooms though, and I’m making those to eat with my dehydrator regularly. Another really cool thing I’ve been making is anchovy chips when my first canned seafood expiration dates approached. They are salty like a potato chip and delicious.
Food Dehydrating Tips For Preppers
I’ve read online in forums, and found in my own experiences, that drying times really do vary. It’s almost always that it takes longer than what is often recommended. You can test this with inexpensive foods like carrots or apples to get a good feel for how long you should run the dehydration for. Some things that can throw this off is how dense or thick your chop is for certain foods too.
Re-hydrating basically means putting the water back into the food. A good tip might be to re-hydrate some of the items like carrots or onions by throwing them in one of your canned soups as you’re heating it up. If you put dehydrated vegetables in a jar of water, you’ll know when they have totally reconstituted by their look and texture.
