MYOF – dried sausages, dried ham, and salmon jerky
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…
All but the cucumber I would consider a success. The machine runs very quiet, most of the time I used it, I let it run over night and sleeping in the next room was no problem.
Ich bekenne, ich bin koffein-süchtig. Wie 
(über 
Ich würde das Gerät ja wirklich gerne mal testen, bin aber nicht bereit, dafür 99€ auszugeben. Wäre interessant wie es im Vergleich zu unserer Faema E61 im Büro abschneidet.