I'm yet another food-drying enthusiast. Most of the points I was going to mention have already been listed (the consequence of being a digest subscriber.), so I'll just add a few extra suggestions. One thing that dehydrates extremely well (virtually indistinguishable from the original) is salsa. It also dehydrates to a very small volume, so you can transport two quarts in a little sandwich bag. The only thing is -- it tends to stick to the dehydrator tray (I use a 10 year old Harvest maid that provides solid plastic drying trays with a lip around the outer edge that generally work great for stuff like this), but if you spray the tray with a little oil first, the salsa comes off fine. Someone mentioned good luck with wax paper, but my experience has been the reverse. It probably depends on what's being dried, but some things (like spaghetti leather) are next to impossible to separate from the wax paper, so I generally use plastic wrap with a little spray oil applied. The two complete meals I like best dehydrated are tamale pie (complete with lots of cheese, corn, pinto beans, hot sauce, tomato sauce, etc) and chili. Since someone mentioned chili _didn't_ work for him, it may also depend on the recipe. I use the Trader Joe's chili recipe (my favorite by far), which uses pinto beans, frozen corn, olives, veggie sausage and the usual fixings and it turns out great. However, I also tried dried sliced veggie wieners and they turned into rubber (even though the sausage I mentioned was fine). I've had tamale pie that was dehydrated and stored in the freezer for two years that tasted fine. As others mentioned, most any stewy kind of meal will dehydrate well _except_ for those with a lot of oil. Even there, some oil is fine as long as the other ingredients, after drying, are capable of fully absorbing it. An excellent book on drying complete meals (and the one that gave me the idea originally) is called "High Trail Cookery" by Linda Frederick Yaffe, which is also where I got my Tamale Pie recipe. Evan Dallas Woodinville Washington *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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