For the sake of full disclosure, however, I will admit that there are certain kinds of foods I prefer to order from certain companies because those particular foods can be a bit challenging to dehydrate. In particular, foods that are high in naturally-occurring sugar will, of course, get gooey and sticky when they are heated. I dehydrated a batch of apples a couple years ago that were darn near impossible to pry off of the dehydrator tray, a problem that didn’t get solved until I bought food-grade plastic mesh sheets to put on the trays first to keep high-sugar foods and other items from sticking to them. (More on those sheets in a moment.) And in calculating how much or how little end product I was ending up with for the time I invested, apples (which had to first be cored, diced and dipped in lemon juice to prevent browning) ended up being more labor-intensive than I wanted to deal with (your mileage may vary), so I decided to order a can of dehydrated apples from WaltonFeed.com and have been very happy with the quality and the price. I’m planning to order a case of banana chips and a case of tomato powder from them very soon as well. (Editor’s note 8-26-10: Since I first posted this thread back in March, I’ve found much better shipping prices — $5 for orders over $75 — at BulkFoods.com.)

Having said that, though, I’ve found that most other foods are much less problematic to dehydrate, so your options are pretty wide-open as to what you can make with relatively little effort. And one thing you want to aim for as you’re putting together your food storage is to make sure you’re getting the biggest nutritional bang for your buck. I promise I won’t “preach” too much on the merits of making and storing food that is “good for you,” but it just makes sense: Healthy eating is especially important in high-stress situations, and if you’re in a situation where you’re having to rely primarily on your food storage for a while, I’m guessing that the situation itself will be stressful. So let’s use my favorite vegetable to illustrate how easy it can be to dehydrate and store food for your long-term survival and health:

SPINACH!

Now, I’m not suggesting that YOU should like spinach, I’m just saying that as far as vegetables go, besides being my favorite, spinach is also packed with vitamins and flavor. And it’s pretty darn easy to dehydrate. So let’s start with the dehydrator.

A few caveats before we begin: I’ve had several of my ideas criticized online by people who tell me I’m not using the “best” dehydrator or that I should buy only fresh vegetables instead of frozen or that I shouldn’t buy my food at Wal-Mart or other big-box stores or that THEY do other things differently and so I should try to do things their way. You might hear the same things from people as you proceed with your own food storage. I’ll offer these few thoughts to the few points above and let you decide for yourself what is best for you.

1. I typically buy frozen vegetables unless fresh vegetables are in season because I can keep the vegetables in the freezer until I’m ready to dehydrate or cook them, and if the vegetables aren’t in season, I’m not keen on paying high prices now when I can wait for much lower prices when whichever fruit or vegetable is in season. It doesn’t make much sense to pay high prices for one thing now if you can buy other fruits or vegetables that are in season at a given time and which are cheaper as a result.

2. I own several Nesco American Harvester food dehydrators that I’ve picked up for about $25 each on eBay over the period of a couple years. They’re not high-end machines like the Excalibur, but they get the job done. And personally, I’d rather have multiple dehydrators since 1. I dehydrate a lot of food; and 2. if something happens to one machine, I still have a backup. Just my two cents, but these machines can save your life. I don’t think I’m exaggerating in saying that — at the moment, I’ve got about 20 quarts of spinach alone (that’s about 80 lbs. before dehydration) that I can keep in storage for a long time until I decide to eat it. The security of knowing I can prepare food by dehydrating it and storing it for several years until I need it (and to have a lot of food on hand that can feed me and my family for a long time) helps me worry less about food so I can turn my attention to other long-term needs. Having said all of this, Nesco puts out a very good product, and I’m willing to stake my entire food-dehydration process on their product.

3. I realize that buying food from various big-box stores, most notably Wal-Mart, is a contentious issue for a lot of people, so I’ll lay out my case and let you decide what is best for yourself. I buy fresh fruits and vegetables in season from local sources whenever and wherever possible. But as I type this, it’s early March, snow is still on the ground in some areas and not many crops are ready for harvest at this time. There’s no local farmers market selling tomatoes along the highway right now, so I’ve been buying packages of frozen spinach recently for about $1.30 per pound at Wal-Mart. The tradeoff of spending my money at big-box stores for frozen vegetables I can’t get fresh, inexpensive and in-season from other places at the moment is the price I’m willing to pay just for now until the local growing season begins and I can buy from local growers. I’d rather make a regular series of purchases from big-box stores during the offseason and keep building up my food storage year-round than only stock up on food when I can get it fresh and local. Most of us go grocery-shopping year-round, so I think it just makes sense to keep stocking up on food-storage items year-round as well.

Now, having gotten those caveats out of the way, on to the good stuff…

These food-grade plastic mesh sheets available from Nesco have saved me a lot of headaches since my first forays into food dehydration. As I noted above, high-sugar foods get really gummy when heated and can stick like super-glue to the dehydrator trays unless you use these mesh sheets. But since spinach isn’t a high-sugar food, we don’t have to worry about this at the moment. However, I will point out that because of how fine the mesh is, it will also help keep food particles from dropping through the trays themselves.

Let’s start with four quarts of frozen spinach:

I put quarts of frozen spinach into, well, quart-sized containers and let the spinach thaw for 6 to 8 hours. I could theoretically microwave it to accelerate the thawing process, but since I want to keep the vitamin content as intact as possible, I just allow several hours for the spinach to thaw and then put it into the dehydrator.

So I start off by spooning the spinach onto a dehydrator tray…

…and then spread it out evenly and as thinly as possible. You want to have whatever product you’re dehydrating spread out as thinly as possible so that you can have as much air flow through the product as possible:

Then I put the lid on, turn on the dehydrator, and in about six hours (your dehydration times may vary) I take the lid off the dehydrator to check on things.

You can see that after several hours of drying, the spinach has shriveled up a bit as the water has been removed. But you’ll notice that some of the pieces are kind of clumped up, and I can feel that they are still a little soggy, so I break those pieces into smaller pieces…

…and after another 4 to 6 hours, it’s done:

And now things get a little tricky.

These dehydrator trays are about 12 inches across and obviously not flexible. The plastic mesh sheet are flexible, but they have little holes all over and a big hole in the middle. The challenge is how to get the spinach from the tray and into a mason jar without spilling it all over the place. The first time I tried to figure out how to do this, I remembered a large, flat box in my office…

Don’t laugh…because it works.

I opened the box flaps, turned the box on its side, stuck the dehydrator tray into the box, inverted the box and then poured the spinach slowly from the box into a quart-sized mason jar, compacting it as much as possible until I couldn’t fit any more spinach into the jar. About 4 lbs. (pre-dehydrated weight) of spinach will fit into a one-quart mason jar if you pack it in tightly.

A couple notes about serving sizes of dehydrated fruits, vegetables and anything else: Obviously because whatever you dehydrate will take up less space after the water is removed, your serving sizes will be proportionately smaller. Leafy vegetables such as spinach are about one-fourth of their original volume after dehydration, so if you’re wanting to cook one cup of spinach, about 1/4 cup of dehydrated spinach or whatever other leafy vegetable will be what you need. Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and other fleshier vegetables and fruits will take up about 1/8 of their original volume after dehydration, so measure accordingly. Breaking up the dehydrated pieces into smaller pieces will help you get a more accurate measurement.

Portion size is vital!

Measure your dehydrated foods carefully so you don’t overestimate how long they will last. If a recipe calls for 1 cup of tomatoes, using 1 cup of dehydrated tomatoes will be the rough equivalent of 4 cups of tomatoes, and you’ll burn through your food storage in no time at all. Portion control will help you ensure that your food storage will last as long as you intend it to last, all other circumstances being equal. Measure your dehydrated items carefully. And enjoy them.

To help you get started:

Here’s a file on dehydrating vegetables that I found at this link. The one thing that I’d recommend you NOT DO is peel the skin off of your fruits or vegetables before you dehydrate them if in fact the skins are edible. The skins are a great source of fiber and vitamins, and you’d be doing yourself a disservice to peel the skins off even if the instructions on that PDF file calls for peeling.

Got ideas or suggestions? Post ‘em below!