Through the Cooking Glass » drying

Snack Bars

brianglass — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 01:51:35 +0000

I came across a really neat recipe for snack bars. Today I made some of these with dates and crispy pecans. For those not familiar with Nourishing Traditions, crispy nuts are basically just nuts soaked in brine for 12-24 hours and then dehydrated till crispy. Not only are they more digestible, they taste significantly better. The pecans taste very buttery.

I basically just threw everything in the blender till fine. Then I dumped it out in a bowl and “kneaded” it till it was a somewhat uniform mass. Then I rolled it out and sliced it into bars. I used a 3/1 ratio of nuts to dates. Then I refrigerated them.

One of my kids liked it and the other didn’t really care for it. I liked it, but I think I’ll try some other variations with different fruits and dry ingredients.

Dried Pineapple

brianglass — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 01:43:43 +0000

My family’s favorite dried food is pineapple (next to sprouted wheat cookies of course). They’re like eating candy. I can fit about 2 pineapples in my dehydrator. I just slice them up and throw them in without any doctoring whatsoever.

Unlike the variety you buy in stores, these don’t have any added sugar, have been dried at a low 105 degrees so they still have most of the enzymes, and they are delicious. They don’t last long in our house.

Sprouted Wheat

brianglass — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:21:32 +0000

I wanted to try making some cookies. My initial thought was to start with the Nestle Tollhouse recipe and tweak it with some minor substitutions. I ended up using the recipe for carob chip cookies from Nourishing Traditions using chocolate chips instead of carob chips.

Of course this required the use of sprouted wheat flour. So I got myself some mason jar lids with screens in them for sprouting. I filled the jars up about 33% with soft white wheat and filled them with water and soaked overnight. I drained and rinsed in the morning and again that evening. They were already sprouting by then. I left them overnight and threw them in my dehydrator in the morning.

This worked really well. I later ground the wheat in my grain mill, which as I’ve mentioned is degrading, so the flour came out pretty coarse. I blame the coarseness of my cookies on this, but also on the fact that I couldn’t get the sucanat to dissolve in the butter. Maybe honey or maple syrup would work better.

I think I’ll try the Tollhouse tweaking idea next time. These weren’t the greatest.

Dehydrator

brianglass — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 01:44:06 +0000

I had been using a $30 el’ cheapo dehydrator for a while. The trays were all cracking and on top of that it had no temperature control so it was heating the food hotter than I wanted. I had been using it primarily for making Nourishing Traditions style crispy nuts.Enter the Nesco Gardenmaster food dehydrator (yes, a Christmas present). Just for kicks I grabbed a bag of apples at the store and threw them in. I took 2 and threw them in the blender with juice from half a lemon and poured that onto the fruit leather tray. The others I ran through my apple slicer and put on the other 3 trays.

I didn’t really time it exactly, but I think it took 4-5 hours. I was amazed since my previous unit seemed to take forever. I ran it at 135 degrees for the first 1-2 hours and then dropped it down to 115. The unit is well built and the best part is that it is expandable to 30 trays.

The kids love the fruit leather and the apple pieces as well.

I’ll be trying doing some sprouted wheat flour and maybe even some jerky.