This past week we met our goals of using our food dehydrator twice to make some shelf stable food and snacks. I can see it is going to cost quite a bit to make any dehydrated food in enough quantity to actually have some for storage. The fruit leather we made was banana/strawberry and it was 3 ripe bananas and 2 lbs of strawberries and gone in less than 4 days. We also made beef jerky with Whole Foods London Broil but 2 huge cuts were barely enough to fill up half the dehydrator.
Even the beef jerky will get eaten very quickly and that will not provide any food to store. The ideal is to use organic, non-GMO, grass fed healthy food. In order to be able to afford this I am going to have to do some serious sale shopping and buy in bulk then dehydrate it ASAP. The fruit and vegetables will actually be easy once things start coming into season and the prices drop. The meat will be another issue. In the past we bought cheap stew meat and cut it into smaller chunks to cure and dehydrate. It made a good bite sized snack and would make a good staple to just toss in a soup to have protein in with the vegetables. Our natural foods coop sells beef in bulk and I can buy a few pounds a week (which I actually have already been doing) so we can make a big batch of the dried once we have about 6 lbs or so. Other than that I will buy the beef from Whole Foods meat counter when it is on sale. This also means I will need to stop buy weekly to check on their sales and see what I can get.
Our next stop is to make sure the dried stuff gets rotated and our 72 hour pack is always nice and fresh. I am using our foodsaver to vacuum seal the bags once they are done. Writing the dates on the bags is the easiest tracking tool we have right now. Of course we have such a small quantity right now rotation is not an issue. I hope to have a much bigger store as the weeks go on and we meet our "fill the dehydrator once weekly" goal.
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