Sunday, October 9, 2011

Lessons in Dehydration

And I'm not talking lack of water during the day. I'm talking FOOD.

Long story short, Kris Bordessa of Attainable Sustainable, a great blog about living a more sustainable life, offered to let me borrow her Excalibur dehydrator. Excalibur is to dehydrators (from what I can tell) what Vitamix is to blenders. And I know Vitamix so I figured this would be a great opportunity to test it out and see if it would be a worthy investment. Like the Vitamix, the Excalibur comes with a hefty price tag.

Add onto this the fact that my new favorite food place is Licious Dishes, gourmet vegan raw food. Of the most delicious variety. Pricey. Delicious. I discovered Licious Dishes at the KCC Farmers Market and have since been to their cute little kitchen at Dole Cannery a couple of times. You know...the fam is eating pizza or hot dogs at Costco and you, as a nutritarian, have absolutely NO option for eating. That's me. So off I run across the parking lot to Dole Cannery, to Licious Dishes, to purchase a most delectable raw burger (she uses an incredible onion flatbread as the bun and I can't even remember what was in the burger but it was amazing) or pesto or lasagna or my favorite, macho nachos.

So now I am in pursuit of delicious dehydrated delectables but I'm starting simple. Today was my first stab at it: bananas, some pineapples, and kale chips.
SIMPLE! EASY! This won't be the end of it. Bananas tasted much like I expected. The pineapple was like chewing on candy (SO SO SWEET) and the kale chips taste even better dehydrated and you don't have to worry about burning them (bad habit of mine).


$2.00 worth of apple bananas from Hilo Farmers Market





I figured out that using a serrated knife worked much better than a straight blade

Perfect size of pineapple for drying










Everything was done in about 5 hours, at 135 degrees. Not exactly considered "raw" (I think it has to be 115 degrees or less) but I'll try that next time.

1 comment:

  1. Love Licious Dishes! I like their spaghetti with zucchini noodles.

    ReplyDelete

SLOW FOOD FRIDAY

S L O W   F O O D    F R I D A Y Wow. Has it been that long? Don't think I fell off the face of the earth due to my increased weig...