Dried Foods

In a follow up to our Little House in the Big Woods post here, this one shows you our journey into dehydrating food.   Let me first start off by saying how this was my first time with a dehydrator and I truly only knew what I was doing thanks to directions that I printed off the internet!

In one section of their story, Ma and Pa mentioned drying foods (fruits and veggies and meats) which started a whole discussion on why and how.   This lead to our adventure into dehydrating foods.

Last month, the students brought in foods they would be interested in drying.  The foods included lemons, limes, apples, bananas, and tomatoes.  This was going to be an interesting experience.   

We started at 8:40am, hoping that most of the foods would be done before we left at 3:10pm.  We got to see the whole process, discuss how the dehydrator works with heat and air and then were able to taste the fruits of our labor. We also discussed how the pioneers didn't have a dehydrator but decided that they used air and heat too, just differently. 


Here are pictures that our Class Reporter took to document our process.  Unfortunately we don't have pics of them trying the foods although they did enjoy most of the items!  Dried lemons seemed to be the least favored ones of them all with tomatoes coming in second.   Check out the last picture, too, that shows all the dried foods we've tried as we did this exploration