Question
KAREN SOO
Do you have any plant-based food suggestions I can make using the dehydrator?
Answer
Well, first of all, you reminded me that when I was a Rouxbe student 11 years ago, that there was that assignment with the raw foods. And I went and I bought the Ronco Manful Peel round food dehydrator, which took days and days and days to dehydrate things. And I thought to myself, because I can be impatient, "This is not going to work for me." So I went on to Facebook Marketplace, and a woman was selling a five-tier Excalibur food dehydrator. An Excalibur is sort of like the Lexus of food dehydrators. And I had to meet her in the parking lot of a grocery store that I'd never been to, and she wanted to be paid in cash. And I met her, and off I went with this almost brand-new Excalibur, and I use it for everything. I'll give you a couple of more examples other than the crackers, which I think is a great idea. I like to dehydrate things like tomatoes and things like mushrooms. I dehydrate them, and then I will take the mushrooms and make them into a mushroom powder, because when you need to add some flavor to a soup or something that you're making and you don't have mushrooms, the mushroom powder is the perfect addition. And if you go to a specialty spice shop, say that three times fast, you go to a specialty spice shop, it's very, very expensive, and sometimes it's cut with other stuff. So vegetable powders. You could make zucchini powder, mushroom powder, tomato powder. I love making tomato powder. So there would be powders. There are fruits. You can make fruit leather, which is kind of fun. I think that the sky is the limit in terms of creating, preserving any foods that you use. And if you have taken the Waste Not course that we have about full food utilization, I think that dehydrating is an excellent way to also prevent waste because you can take some marred fruits or vegetables and turn them into something delicious. So I say have fun with the food dehydrator. It's a fun thing to do with children, and just enjoy it and have fun. And I'm sure those crackers sound delicious. Which, by the way, there was an ad for a flax cracker, and they were $12 for a little 4 oz bag. So keep making those crackers because they'll be great for holiday parties and lunches and everything else like that. So thanks for a very good question.
