POW ran a workshop last Saturday (16th Jan) on preserving food using a food dehydrator. There’s a lot of advantages to drying your food. It reduces the weight and bulk of fresh food dramatically: 2kg of apricots can be turned into 0.5kg when dried. Food drying preserves the nutritional value of the food, extends its life (even longer when stored in the fridge), and concentrates the flavour. All types of food can be dried: fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, herbs and flowers.

My electric food dryer is 500w. The cost of running it for 24 hours works out about $2.40 for me. I’m on a 100% green power tariff, so my CO2 emissions are offset 100%. The way I see it, I buy the produce when it’s in season and cheaper. I dry it, and then can eat it when it dearer and out of season.

The best low cost dryer is the sun. It may not be as easy to dry your food compared to a electric food dryer; one of the drawbacks is when the sun goes down, any produce still drying needs to be moved to a dry place so that it doesn’t take up moisture from the night air or from water condensing on a solar dryer. But food drying has been done in the sun since, well, since Adam was a boy, and it’s just a matter of adjusting our mindset to be more patient.

I’ve been looking around for some solar food dryers, and have located a couple of websites that have some good designs. One is Geofinder (http://www.geopathfinder.com/9473.html), and another is BuildItSolar (http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Cooking/cooking.htm#Drying). BuildItSolar has a solar food dryer design made from 2 cardboard boxes. That’s the one I’m planning to build on the weekend. I’ll post an update to tell you how it goes.

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