Preserving Food - Dehydrating

Fall is hands-down, my favorite time of year. The weather turns colder, the leaves turn brilliant colors, and the garden vegetables are plentiful.

Very plentiful. In fact, I'm spending a good portion of every day preserving food so that none of those veggies go to waste. Honestly, its a job. But it's a job I enjoy and I love knowing that all winter we will continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor!

I've only recently started using my food dehydrator more regularly. To date, most of my efforts have been on canning and freezing. I have found that dehydrated vegetables make a great snack and don't take up much room for storage.

Eggplant are some of my favorites in the dehydrator.

Preserving this beautiful eggplant by drying it out in the dehydrator.

I used the mandolin to cut the eggplant into slices of the same thickness. This ensures that they all dry out evenly. Then I sprinkled the slices with Himalayan Pink Salt. I arranged the slices so that there was plenty of space for the air to circulate around each slice. I let them dry out in the dehydrator for the day. It's an easy method of preserving a vegetable that has grown so plentifully in our garden.

The mandolin allowed each slice to be uniform in thickness.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time picking cherry tomatoes. Many of the tomatoes have started to split open on the vine, which makes them less appealing to eat whole. I thought that dehydrating them might be a good use for these split tomatoes. I painstakingly cutting each one in half and placed them on the tray to dry out in the dehydrator.

Preparing cherry tomatoes for the dehydrator.

It took 11 hours, but the end result were some delicious little tomato snacks that I just can't get enough of!

Every tray of the dehydrator was full of cherry tomatoes.

In the past, I have always stored these dehydrated veggies in a mason jar. I decided to try vacuum sealing them to see if they will have a longer shelf life. In theory, this should work. However, I did notice that the vegetables were so highly compressed in the vacuum bags that I'm not sure whether or not they will maintain their shape. Time will tell!

Nutritious snacks, ready for storage.