(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


The Best Thing about having both a Vacuum Chamber and a Dehydrator in the Kitchen

2021-10-29 21:34:39+00:00

So a few years ago a colleague-friend gave me a sous-vide wand; as all these things begin, at first I purchased a cheap “food-saver” type vacuum sealer, but eventually bought a vacuum chamber because it allows for bagging soups and other liquids without stress.

Another friend extolled the virtues of the Excalibur dehydrator series, and so I have one of them too, and it and the vacuum sit side-by-side quietly doing odd bits of work, waiting, waiting… and then:

Discount Mushrooms!

…and to be fair, discount tomatoes, oranges, lemons, banana, watermelon – OMG dried watermelon is dangerously addictive.

In this case, though: mushrooms.

I bought 2kg of chestnut mushrooms from Morrisons, for the grand price of £2.40; from past experience these will (fairly precisely) lose 90% of their weight with drying, so that will be £2.40 + a few pennies of electricity, for 200g of dried mushrooms to go into Kapustnica, or Risotto, Stews…

How much would 200g of dried mixed mushrooms cost from a comparable supermarket? A little googling suggests between £8 and £15 would be reasonable figures, so having bountiful cheap dried ingredients is a massive win.

The dehydrator takes a while to pay for itself, but not as long as you would expect, and making (eg:) fruit leathers, or biltong, or oat crackers, gives you plentiful healthy long-life snacks.

HOWEVER: I did learn my lesson, once: home-dried mushrooms in the UK are massively hygroscopic, so will suck moisture out of the air, rehydrate, and go off. Therefore: once dried (and massively shrunk) they will be bagged, vacuum-sealed in 100g packets, and dropped in the deep-freeze for indefinite storage.
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/15181
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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