Buying a dehydrator?

nessie7918

I was interested in buying a food dehydrator, I'm not into making anything complicated, and I wanted to know about a good quality dehydrator for someone on a budget? Thanks!

ofthesea

you could start off with a nesco dehydrator. theyre 60 bucks and in my experience work really well.

http://www.nesco.com/category_449f7f01f1ea/product_db21f85c8f63/session_d5f392f5cd09/

KarinaFirebreather

Yeah, I "inherited" a Nesco dehydrator that my family was using to dry herbs, and it's worked really well. I dry fruit, make crackers, etc.

My only criticism of the Nesco:

With the Nesco, there's no outer structure or "oven", you just stack the trays on top of the motor unit. Since you can only use the trays, and have to stack them, you can't just put a bowl or a tall tray of food into the dehydrator. This has limited me in terms of using the dehydrator to warm foods or do large-capacity stuff. I even have to make sure my raw cookies and fruit aren't too tall, or else they squish into the next tray above.

So, if you can spring for a small Excalibur dehydrator (the one that raw-food sites always plug) you might want to make the leap, because it's more of an "oven"-style dryer -- there's an outer structure inside which you slide the trays. This means you can warm a bowl of soup or dry extra-tall foods just by taking trays out.

Hopefully this makes sense :)