[Dans]

Hi all,

Getting prepared for the fruit trees to start throwing fruit at us and to feed my daughter's growing fruit leather habit, so we need a dehydrator.

Hubby has been looking and there seem to be £40ish ones, £100ish ones and then scary ones. Unfortunately we have no idea what we are looking for. Any suggestions? Any features that it absolutely must have. Looking to make fruit leather and dry plums, apples and pears mostly.

Thanks

Dans

[Womble]

Hi Dans,

I used to use one to dry fruit to make 'trail mix' when I did a lot of canoeing. Mine was homemade though - just a couple of old style incandescent lightbulbs, a computer fan and a simple thermostat mounted inside an insulated wooden box with some trays.

I don't do much dehydrating these days, but I've had some success using our range cooker with the door ajar. You can even spread things out on a car dashboard on a hot day!!

I remember that some fruits worked better than others: Bananas never quite tasted right. Strawberry fruit leather was great. Apples needed to be soaked in lemon juice to stop them from going brown, but then tasted fantastic, whilst kiwi fruit turned into sherbetty tasting candy! 

So I'm not really up to date with commercial dehydrators, but try searching the USA canoeing fora and you should get the info you need. That sort of thing often sells very cheap second hand on fleabay too.

[Dans]

Thanks Womble. We've got a crappy electric oven that is desperate need of a clean so I'm not sure that would work for us. I'll have a search of that forum though, and thank you for the tips on worthwhile things to try.

Dans

[Black Sheep]

There's an article on this and how to make a home-made dehydrator in this month's Home Farmer. The home-made box sounds a lot like Womble's contraption :-)

[Womble]

Hmmm, why do people keep using the words "Womble" and "contraption" in the same sentence!?