At the start of morel mushroom season, I had visions of finding so many mushrooms that I would have enough to sell at the annual Muscoda Morel festival. I hoped that would in turn provide some money to buy a dehydrator to preserve future mushrooms. The canceling of the festival due to COVID-19 and the poor mushroom season put an end to those dreams. Two morel mushrooms were not worth dehydrating.
Several months later, I returned to the idea of a dehydrator. We inoculated logs for shiitake mushrooms in the spring, so I am still hopeful we will eventually produce more mushrooms than we can eat. Dehydration is a great way to preserve mushrooms.
One day while we were in the Richland Center Goodwill store, I came across a dehydrator. When I plugged it into the test outlet, however, it did not work. Disappointed, I put it back on the shelf, and noticed a new, still-in-the-box, dehydrator. Price tag - $9. I could not get it to the checkout fast enough.
I suggested giving the little dehydrator a try on some of our garden produce this summer. We sliced up a few onions, tomatoes, and apples. In 12 hours, all were dried, and much smaller. A successful test run, our dried produce was transferred to jars for future use.
Dehydration is one of our small running disagreements. Maggie prefers off-the-grid solutions, but I do not think our damp and cool climate is conducive to dehydrating produce by non-electric means. Open air drying racks for herbs would probably work.
Being an engineer, I did a quick calculation on energy usage. The tag on the base of the dehydrator indicates it is an 135-watt unit. If it runs for 12 hours, the unit consumes 1,620 watt-hours, or 1.62 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. Our recent electric bill from the cooperative indicates we are paying $0.136/kWh, so one batch of produce processed through this dehydrator uses $0.22 of electricity. This seems unbelievably small, but it is consistent with other sources I found online that looked at this issue. A 600-watt dehydrator such as produced by Excalibur cost less that a dollar to run for 12 hours. Dehydration has other issues such as capacity limitations, so it is not a good solution for bulky foods. Some models require rotating racks for effective dehydration due to uneven air flow. For some crops, like mushrooms, it may be a workable solution.
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