I purchased The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook: The Complete Guide to Drying Food plus 398 Recipes including Making Jerky, Fruit Leather & Just-Add-Water Meals by Tammy Gangloff.
Seriously. That's the long-winded title of the book. Click on the above hyper link, it's faster. Her editor should be fired for allowing that kind of title. The good news is the title is really the only bad thing about this book.
I am a relative newbie to dehydrating. A friend introduced me to Tammy's YouTube channel: dehydrate2store. Watching her plethora of videos gave me the confidence to try. I obtained a round dehydrator for free, and saved up money to buy a 4 tray Excalibur dehydrator. <== That hyperlink will take you to a 4 tray which costs about $99. I am glad that I have it (certainly, it is a better purchase than spending $60-80 on a round one for too many reasons to mention), but I wish I had saved up a little more and bought a 9 tray Excalibur <== for $189. Eventually perhaps I will, but I figure: better to be prepping now, than saving up to prep later.
Because I bought my dehydrator used, last year I purchased Excalibur's cookbook: Preserve It Naturally, which costs about $24. I'm not sorry I did, because it helped me understand how to use my Excalibur, but I have to say a year later, I would buy Tammy's vs. Preserve it. Both Tammy's and the Preserve It book presume you have an Excalibur dehydrator...evidenced by the "dehydrate at this temperature" settings in each ingredient. If you have one of those super cheap round ones like I do, this may be frustrating, because we only have "one" setting: full blast. All it really means is you're going to be done faster, lol. Tammy says it's impossible to over dry something, and she's the expert, so I'll take her word for it.
The only other misnomer about Tammy's book is the "398 recipes" part. It's true, there are 398 "recipes," but in my world, it's hard to call "combine these 5 herb ingredients add oil to make X salad dressing..." a recipe, although by definition it is technically true. Still the "true recipes" portion of the book begins about halfway through the 343 page book, so it does include quite a plethora of "true" recipes for meals, side dishes, soups, salads etc. Someone asked me if the "recipes" in the book were different than on her website. I don't know, and frankly, for $16, I prefer a book all in one place, than copying and pasting and having it un-organized in a binder. YMMV.
Some experienced dehydrators feel they don't need the "recipes" part. As a newbie dehydrater, I strongly disagree. That recipe portion of the book is the reason I bought it. I'm going further this year and dehydrating a (finished product) quart of every vegetable and fruit ingredient listed in her book. There are 96 of them by the way, not including herbs. Email me (pcdirector@gmail.com) if you want the list. My thought is: if I dehydrate every ingredient, then when I go to make the recipes, beyond bulking up my food storage, I will actually have the ingredients on hand.
Eventually I will be taking the some of the recipes and sizing them down to cook Grid Down! in a Thermos (title of my new work-in-progress book-just saying.) (Can you tell I'm a bit of an addict when it comes to food storage and prepping?) Post-move, I plan to build shelving out of 1" x 6"s to store all the dehydrated quarts. In alphabetical order. Neatly arranged. (Further evidence that I am a nerd.)
It's because I look at dehydrating as a prepper that I raise an eyebrow at some of Tammy's recommendations. This largely centers around her "cream of" type recipes. She takes the ingredients, rehydrates/cooks them, then uses an immersion blender to puree them. ME, I would take the ingredients, cook them, puree them, then dehydrate the puree so that in a grid down situation, all you have to do is add hot water and go. She advocates her method when it comes to pureed soups repeatedly. I can't understand why.
At $16, The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook is a must have. In true nerd fashion, I read it (not skimmed, read it, including all the recipes) cover to cover in 2 days. I loved being taught how to make crackers, how to dry herbs for teas, leathers (who knew corn syrup was a secret ingredient to pliability?), drying meats and fish, and combining dehydrated ingredients into main courses. I particularly value that it is written to the beginner to mid-level dehydrater, but I think even the most experienced dehydrater will find something of value. Easy to read, easy to understand, by the time you have read it cover to cover, you will catch the vision of dehydrating food to store. I really wish I hadn't missed the "pumpkin season:" sure would be nice to have a quart of dehydrated pumpkin powder to make pumpkin pie in a snap.
As a prepper, this book gives me the confidence to begin or add to my food storage & skills. I know I can build an off grid dehydrator (she doesn't teach this in her book) and have yet another way to preserve food. I've always planned on using my quart pasta sauce jars from re-invented Classico or La Romanella to store my dehydrated items, making the cost of storage virtually free. Tammy advocates the use of oxygen absorbers as a sealant. I can't afford them, they're not reusable, so I'm going to be sealing them with my handheld Reynolds (or Foodsaver) sealer, and Food Saver's Regular Mouth and Wide Mouth jar sealers, the lids to which can be reused indefinitely. My video demonstrating using the handheld to store food can be found here: http://youtu.be/uRRdpbQzqqE?list=UUcBqcPCg2yBUou3KRvOhloA.
The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook by Tammy Gangloff is likely one of the best books on dehydrating you'll ever purchase. It could well be the only book on dehydrating you will need to purchase, it's that good.
Stay tuned!
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