RE: [Paddlewise] Follow-up Dehydrating Questions

Alex

Well, the capacity is determined more by tray size than by weight.  Mine has
8 trays and each tray each holds 0.86 square feet per tray (according to the
advertising on the side of the box it came in), so that's a little less than
7 sq. feet fully loaded (sounds like an ad for a car).  So how many pounds
of apricots can you squeeze into 7 feet?  I'll leave that one to you.  

But in my opinion, it's not just a question of price (store bought may
actually be cheaper, at least for the common stuff like prunes, raisins,
etc), but also quality.  You can bet that the apricots (or other fruit) used
for commercial drying aren't their best quality.  Also, you can avoid the
sulphuring that is common to most commercial dried fruit.  Another nice
option is to buy extra fruit from the fruit stands at peak season when they
taste best and are often at their cheapest, then dry the extras.  Although
I'm probably biased, I think my home dried stuff tastes a lot better than
the commercial stuff. I've even bought canned pineapple, dried it, and it
STILL tasted better than store-bought dried pineapple.  I haven't tried
drying fresh pineapple (just because I always end up eating it!), but I'm
sure that would be vastly superior.

Just for fun, try dehydrating watermelon some time!  (A little too sweet for
my taste, but definitely worth trying.  I may add some lemon to it next time
I try it.)

Evan


-----Original Message-----
From: alex [mailto:al.m_at_3web.net] 
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 7:16 PM
To: evand_at_pensionresourcegroup.com; paddlewise_at_paddlewise.net
Subject: Re: [Paddlewise] Follow-up Dehydrating Questions

> pay around 10 cents per each additional kilowatt hour.  So using my
> dehydrator at full power for 14 hours would cost roughly $0.70.

Did you check, how many lbs of fresh apricots you can load, and how many lbs
of dry apricots you get in the end? I'm just trying to figure out if we can
beat supermarket dehydrated prices.  Or - "freeze-dried".  I don't know
whether those dry bananas that I've bought in Chinatown, were dehydrated of
freeze-dried (not a single English word on the package), but they were not
cheap - $4 per lb or even more. (No weight on the package either - hell, I
don't even know if they are sure bananas :-)
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