In the last two weeks I experimented a little more with my dehydrator. My first experiment was to find something meaty to add to mashed potatoes. In my local super market I bought three brands of sausages, cut them in small pieces and dried them. Experiment two was to dry pre-cut salmon and ham and see how tasty the result would be.
I used two sausages each from the 3 brands on the left, cut one in roughly 2cm long pieces and the other in 1cm thick, diagonally cut pieces because I wasn’t sure how well the dehydration will work.
Observation 1: Not surprisingly, there is a lot of fat in sausages. Even the ones which look like mostly meat contain a lot. So after 30 minutes I removed everything from the dehydrator and put paper towel under the pieces to soak up the fat
Observation 2: It takes a long time to properly dry sausages. At first I ran the dehydrator at 70ºC for 6 hours, the sausages shrank a little but the meat bits still looked pretty juicy to me and felt soft. After another 6 hours the result were crunchy sausage bit.
Observation 3: Drying sausage is one of the few things were size doesn’t matter. Both cuts looked, felt and tasted the same.
Observation 4: You can dry Sauerkraut, too. I guess this is a German thing, but I had to try it. As you can see from the image below, I had some room in the dehydrator so I added Sauerkraut for the first drying run of 6 hours. The result was eatable, better than a lot of other trail food I have tried.
Dried bits of all three brands tasted great, crunchy and still meaty, my personal favorite were the dried A&P Schinkenknacker. Add some instant mashed potatoes and some dried Sauerkraut and you have a pretty yummy instant meal on the trail.
My second experiment took was less innovative. I bought slices of salmon and turkey ham.
I dried both at 70ºC for 6 hours. When I checked after 2-3 hours I noticed that the salmon stuck to the metal grill of the dehydrator, so again I removed it all and put a layer of baking paper in (yes, the pictures below are staged because I forgot to take pictures at first).
Both the salmon (picture on the left) and the ham (on the right) turned out pretty good. The salmon tasted a little too salty and I will check the salmon and make sure that it’s not seasoned the next time. At first the ham was extremely dry, like crisps. But after a day it had drawn some moisture from the air and hat the normal jerky consistency.
Improvements for next time: unseasoned salmon and reduce time for ham to 4-5 hours.
I’m always looking for additional ideas to try, so please let me know if you have any suggestions on what to dehydrate…
hrXXLight Says:
August 6th, 2011 at 6:30hrXXLight
Wow very interesting post.
I’ll test both things in the next time. The salomon jerky looks pretty good like fish chips
Frank Spychalski Says:
August 7th, 2011 at 12:30Frank Spychalski
Thanks. The salmon jerky is my favorite so far, too. Ripped into smaller pieces it’s a great addon to home-made trail food.
fuerchtnix Says:
August 7th, 2011 at 14:31fuerchtnix
I would try using “Kassler” or slices of roasted pork. They both do not contain much fat so they should dry nicely. why don’t you buy them already in thin slices at a butcher. Makes dehydrating even easier.
Vegetables: have tried peppers and cherry tomatoes( store bought ones are often too salty)
Frank Spychalski Says:
August 9th, 2011 at 6:53Frank Spychalski
I thought about Kassler, too. I’m living in the more civilized parts of Bavaria but I couldn’t find it yet. I will be busy this week, making food for next week. I just started another batch of Salmon and will run at least one batch of sausages, some bananas and perhaps some apples. Fortunately the dehydrator is not noisy and I can keep it running over night.