Recipes for dehydrated natural produce

What's better in a salad than sun-dried tomatoes! Market's ready-made sun-dried tomatoes are of course good, but they often have a slightly industrial aftertaste. Sun-dried tomatoes are very easy to prepare even without the sun by drying cherry tomatoes and storing them in a glass jar. 

Chili gives food a wonderful kick and deepens the flavors. There are thousands of chili varieties and all of them can also be dried, which gives the chili a significantly longer shelf life and often an even deeper flavor. Of the chili varieties, especially Thick-skinned ones should be dried in a utility food dehydrator, where they dry best.

It has probably happened to most of us that you buy a potted herb at the Market, you only use part of it, and after a few days you realize that the herb has already died and dry out and eventually ends up in the trash. Does it sound familiar? Or do you grow herbs yourself, but they usually die before you can use them completely?

Forests are still full of mushrooms, so it’s still good time to go to the forest pick mushrooms and prepare delicious, light and healthy dishes from mushrooms!

After the summer, when the forests and bushes were full of berries, it’s excellent to recap how we can get the most out of them and what we must do to preserve them during winter.

Dry place with even temperature, protected from light, such as a kitchen cupboard. The best storage container is a glass jar.

See the manual for tips per product group.

You can fit 4–5 kg of chopped mushrooms in an Orakas dehydrator. You can fit in about 20 litres of herbs, such as nettles, and, for example, about 7 litres of bilberries.

Orakas will never dry the products too much. For herbs, we recommend no more than 35 degrees, and for mushrooms under 40 degrees Celsius.

Dried products take up less storage space, because the volume is reduced by 80% and weight 90%. For example, one litre of funnel chanterelle (Craterellus tubaeformis) will weight just 30 g after drying.

The drying time depends of the product properties, such as thickness and relative humidity, conditions when it was picked, and the drying temperature. The temperature in Orakas can be adjusted from anything between room temperature to 50 degrees Celsius. 

Drying times:

• Tea ingredients and herbs 2–6 hours
• Mushrooms and root vegetables 3–8 hours
• Berries 10–15 hours (gooseberries should be cut in half before drying)
• Fish thinly sliced and filleted 6–7 hours
• Meat cut into thin slices 6–10 hours.

Orakas can be used to dry garden produce, wild plants, meat and fish. You can also use it to prepare picnic or hiking foods.