My favorite food dehydrating reference books! Inspiring and educational! Newsletter #46! 🍎🧄🐶💕

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My favorite books on food dehydrating!

You might want to stock up on produce from the farmers market, or have leftovers you'd like to save, or maybe you visited a farm and have a lot of produce, and now it's time to dry it. Or as with The Price is Right, you might want to plan what to plant in your garden and having some dried recipes in advance might help you be ready for preserving your harvest. Whatever the reason, here are two inspiration books on dehydration that you might like. (and let me know if you have any of your own that you'd like to recommend!)

Now a disclaimer, these books aren't perfect (nor are they technical, which I would like: a bit more science would be nice), but these books will definitely get you inspired to dehydrate foods, as well as provide a very useful starting-point when working with new raw foods:

1. "The Dehydration Bible"
Great introduction on utensils. Great starting point for times and temperatures. Nice tips on preparation of foods. I'm yet to extensively use the recipes in the back of the book/"Part 2" of the book, which has lots of recipes utilizing dehydrated ingredients, although there's a lot of great recipes and ideas in here!

Con: In my opinion, too much of the book is dedicated to recipes using dried ingredients in Part 2, and not enough in-depth discussion on dehydrating and ready-to-eat dried foods. (It depends what inspires you.)

Pro: The clearly laid-out section on times and temps as well as preparation is a helpful starting point when you're dehydrating a new food, but it could be more in-depth with more dried snack recipes.
 
https://www.amazon.com/Dehydrator-Bible-over-400-Recipes/dp/0778802132

20% of book is on dehydration (74 pages), while the 80% remaining is recipes using dehydrated ingredients, which is fairly too heavy on the latter, as confirmed by some disgruntled Amazon reviewers.



2. Mary Bell's "Complete Dehydrator Cookbook"
There's more in-depth discussion on recipes for making finished dried 'dishes', and less recipes that use dehydrated ingredients (similar to "The Dehydration Bible" book, Mary Bell's Part 2 is dedicated to cooking with dried foods. 56% of the book is on dehydrating, whereas 44% is on recipes using dehydrated foods. There's a much better discussion on making ready-to-eat dried recipes. I think a lot of folks are curious on how to make a ready-to-eat dried snacks (or at least, that's my interest.)

https://a.co/d/4UyMmHK

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