Mary Bell's Comp Dehydrator Cookbook

Mary Bell's Comp Dehydrator Cookbook

Mary Bell's Comp Dehydrator Cookbook

Mary Bell's Comp Dehydrator Cookbook

eBook

$2.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

Far from being a fad, food dehydrating is one of the most ancient, effective, and nutritious ways of preserving food. Now, at last, there is a book that teaches absolutely everything there is to know about using an electric food dehydrator to dry foods at home -- and gives more than 100 foolproof recipes for scrumptious snacks and meals made from dried foods.

With this extraordinary book, you can learn how to cross junk food and expensive store-bought snacks off your family's shopping list -- and add to your cupboard homemade, preservative-free fruit leathers, candied apricots, beef (and fish) jerkies, "sun" dried tomotoes, corn chips, banana chips, and so much more!

Mary Bell gives specific techniques and instructions for preparing every kind of fruit (from apples to watermelon) and vegetable (from asparagus to zucchini). She also provides important shopping tips for buying an electric food dehydrator. The recipes for cooked meals (including mushroom soup, sloppy joes, pesto, and moist banana bread) will make this book a kitchen classic. And recipes for lightweight, filling trail snacks mean that the book will travel, too.

Additional chapters explain to how make herb seasonings, granolas, celery powder, cosmetics, dried fruit sugars, potpourri -- and even pet treats!

Food drying is an excellent way for gardeners to preserve their produce. It is a great way to make healthful snacks for the kids. It's perfect for the new wave of thrifty consumers who can't bear to spend dollars at health food stores for treats they cold make for pennies themselves. And food drying doesn't use chemicals or preservatives—so it's great for you and for the planet, too!


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062040923
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 02/26/2013
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 360 KB

About the Author

Mary Bell has spent more than twenty years traveling around the country demonstrating food dehydrators and food drying techniques. When not on the road, she divides her time between Madison, Wisconsin, and Lanesboro, Minnesota, where she and her husband work at the Forest Resource Center, an environmental education facility. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and holds a master's degree from Saint Mary's College.


An editor at Gourmet Magazine for over 10 years, Evie Righter wrote the text to Gourmet's Menus for Contemporary Living. She has worked on books by many of the greatest talents in the world of food, including Alice Waters, Ann Willan, Michél Guéard, and Wolfgang Puck.

Read an Excerpt

Mary Bell's Comp Dehydrator Cookbook


By Mary Bell

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Mary Bell
All right reserved.

ISBN: 0688130240

Chapter One

A Brief History of Food Drying

Food dehydration is the world's oldest method of food preservation. Think for a moment: Before refrigerators and freezers how did people preserve food? For the most part, they dried it. Today we are living in a time of canned this, frozen that, irradiated something else. Canning, which is another way to preserve and store food, is only about two hundred years old. Both the canning and freezing of food rose to popularity during the early 1900s, when electricity became more and more available to people, no matter where they lived. However, ignored until recently was the age-old process of drying food as a method of storing it.

Centuries past, people in the Near East preserved fruit by wrapping it in dried palm leaves and burying it in hot sand to dry. Only a century or so ago, people in the Arctic created caches of surplus "freeze dried" walrus meat by piling stones on top of their treasure to keep predators from devouring it. Native Americans in northern parts of the United States used smoke (dry circulating air) from a fire to dry meat, herbs, vegetables, or fish. Indians in Peru dried potatoes (and do to this day) by first freezing them overnight outdoors, then trampling them the next daywhile the potatoes thawed, thus squeezing out the water remaining in them. Then, they air-dried the potatoes until crisp enough to store. Almost everywhere in the world, people have utilized some food-drying method in order to save food from one season to the next, be it hay or corn or seal meat or apples.

Why did people dry food? Quite simply, because fresh food was not always available. Without dried foods, a nomadic lifestyle would have been impossible. The sun and wind, or the smoke from a fire, provided the means to remove water from grains, meat, fruits, and herbs; thus were they preserved from one season to the next. However, success in drying food depended upon choosing the right days on which to dry it, luck, and more than a little ingenuity. The elements were unpredictable. Food that was left to dry in open fields, for example, could be gone in a flash: It could rain, insects might infest it, wild animals and birds might help themselves.

Over time, people in different cultures perfected drying wild and cultivated foods. The Greeks and Romans dried peas and grapes successfully. The Persians learned how to preserve dates, and apricots, and melons. The Chinese and Japanese, clever at the art of food preservation, cured fish and sea vegetables. Mongolian explorers, en route to Europe, packed bundles of dried milk products to sustain them on their long journey. In our own country, early settlers, observing the practice of sun-drying food by Native Americans in the northern regions, learned to dry many varieties of corn, squash, and herbs, plus buffalo meat and venison as they pioneered west.

In the United States, during the nineteenth century, many housewives preserved fruits in sugar, vegetables and nuts in salt, fruits and vegetables in brine. Dried food was a traditional alternative to fresh food, but before the age of glass canning jars and self-sealing zinc jar lids, which were not patented until 1858, food was likely to be stored in stone or earthenware crocks, tin cans, and glass containers. Sealing wax, beeswax, corks, and even putty were sometimes used to seal the lids.

Throughout history, dried meats and fish have provided lifesustaining protein for people around the world. Our ancestors dried meats and kept them year after year, without benefit of refrigeration. Meats and fish, in fact, were the foods most commonly dried. The irony of this is that fish is one of the most difficult types of food to dry because of the potential for bacterial growth in the raw product. Historically, meat, like fish, was pretreated in a dry salt cure or a brine solution, the salt serving to draw water out of the food. Lastly, meats and fish were also smoked.

Many foods today would not be part of the world's cuisines were it not for people having figured out how to dry and thus preserve them. How different Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and other Asian cuisines would be without dried fish, shellfish, or sea vegetables, including seaweed. Over centuries of experimenting, Asian peoples found that many foods when dried had intriguing flavors and textures that they did not have when eaten fresh. For instance, the Chinese enjoy fresh sea scallops in cooking, but even their delicacy cannot be compared to the exquisite taste of a dried scallop. Flowers, too, like lily buds, are eaten fresh in the Orient but more commonly are dried, as are fungi, such as tree ears. Some items, such as shark's fin and sea slug, are more prized (and more expensive) in dried form than fresh.

The Chinese lay claim to being the first to cure pork products -- ham, bacon, and sausage -- calling ham huo-fu, or fire-dried meat. Actually, the word refers to any meat that is cured by having first been soaked in a soy sauce marinade, then dried over a slow fire. The Chinese treated bacon in the same way. To this day, strips of cured pork belly, dark golden in color, hang in Chinese meat markets.

Modern Times

The twentieth century has transformed food drying into a science -- food dehydration -- and its success no longer rests upon luck or happenstance. Today, advanced technology can provide constant, thermostatically controlled heat and a consistent air flow to dry an extraordinary range of foodstuffs.

In 1943, in the United States, there were more than 139 vegetable-drying plants in operation, producing more than 115 million pounds of dried food per year. In 1944, during the war, more than 375 million pounds of dried potatoes and 76 million pounds of dried vegetables were produced. In 1970, there were 18 fruitdrying plants alone for raisins, 307 plants for prunes, and 11 for apples. . . .

Continues...


Excerpted from Mary Bell's Comp Dehydrator Cookbook by Mary Bell Copyright © 2006 by Mary Bell. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews