Using Dehydrated Food: Fruits, Veggies, Herbs, More! • Homestead Lady

Using dehydrated food doesn’t have to be complicated! You’ve gone to all the trouble of learning how to dehydrate food, now it’s time to eat the results of your labor. Let us simplify learning how to use your dehydrated foods with lists of suggested recipes, as well as tips and troubleshooting. From veggies to fruit to herbs, we’ve shared our favorite ways of using dehydrated foods.

Using Dehydrated Food

So, you’ve learned how to dehydrate foods of all kinds – fruit, veggies, herbs, and more! Have you figured out how to use them yet?

Using dehydrated food that you’ve preserved yourself is a challenge all on its own. Sometimes we set out our jars of beautifully dehydrated food only to stare at them wondering what to do with them!

Or maybe you’re still on the fence about dehydrating food at all and haven’t quite committed to the method.

Here are a few more resources for later reading:

Consider Using Dehydrated Foods

If you’re new to preserving foods, learning to dehydrate food is a great place to start! Here are a few reasons to learn how:

1. It’s great for those who live alone or for couples because you can dehydrate small portions.
2. You never need to waste fresh foods because you can preserve the extras.
3. Dehydrated veggies and fruits can be blended into versatile powder that can be incorporated into other foods like frosting, pasta, soups, and smoothies.
4. Power outages can’t adversely affect your food supply because you have stored food beyond what’s in your fridge or freezer. (Although, dehydrated foods do best when stored in a cool place like a basement, FYI.)
5. By dehydrating leftovers and extras, you minimize food waste in your zero waste kitchen.
6. Dehydrated foods are lighter for camping and hiking than canned foods. (Freeze dried foods are even lighter!)
7. If you don’t have enough for a whole batch of canning, dehydrating is a good option for small batch preservation.
8. Dehydrated foods can be used to make quick meals – the veggies are already chopped and prepared.

All of the above applies to freeze dried food, too!

To help you keep your food preservation year organized and efficient, please join our email newsletter group to receive your FREE Food Preservation Worksheets. Print off only what you need and start filling in the worksheets! (There’s a black and white option for economical printing, FYI.)

Using Dehydrated Foods: Fruit

Fruit is actually one of the most pleasing foods to preserve, and dehydrated or freeze dried fruit is particularly versatile and tasty.

• The drying process often enhances the flavor of the sugars, making dried fruit taste like candy in some instances.

For more information on the processes of dehydrating and freeze drying, please visit our article: Dehydrator vs. Freeze Dryer.

My favorite way of serving dehydrated fruit is simply as a healthy snack for the kids, but there’s a lot you can do with it.

Here Are Some Ways to Use Dehydrated Fruit:

You can also use the general instructions in our article Spiced Cranberry Punch or Kefir Soda. Swap out 1 cup of fresh cranberries for 1/4 cup of dehydrated.

Some dehydrated fruits are so versatile that you can use them for for both crafts and foods – like citrus!

While fruit is generally pleasing to eat (as in kids will eat it without complaint), large amounts of vegetables can be harder to integrate into meals.

Anywhere from 5-10 cups of veggies per day is a great goal for a healthy lifestyle, but that’s a lot!

Using Dehydrated Foods: Vegetables

Dehydrated vegetables are the friend of every parent trying to feed a picky kid because they easily integrate into any meal.

• Plus, if you learn how to dehydrate vegetables and turn them into powder, you can easily incorporated them into just about any homemade food.

Since powdering is one of my favorite ways to use dehydrated vegetables, I’ve included a whole section on only that topic at the end of the post. There are several recipes linked in that section, but to get started, here’s how to powder dehydrated vegetables from Purposeful Pantry.

• I need to stop here and say that Purposeful Pantry is your best friend when it comes to learning how to dehydrate food! Darcy can help you learn to dehydrate, literally, anything (that can safely be dehydrated). 

I highly recommend taking a lot of time to just hang out in her space.

Here Are Some Ways to Use Dehydrated Veggies:

Pop dehydrated veggies into the soup pot or Instant Pot. You can also add them to stew, or chili to rehydrate in the broth – no need to rehydrate first if you simmer long enough (20-45 minutes for most veggies).

• You can do this for stir fry, too, depending on how long you sauté it and how much water or broth is in the pan. Eventually, you’ll learn to judge hydration levels of rehydrating food to achieve your preferred texture.

Rehydrate and add to casserole, stir fry, strata, omelets, skillet dishes, and more. Purposeful Pantry can help you learn ways to rehydrate dehydrated food properly. See, I told you that Darcy’s site was just what you need to learn more!

• You can also add home dehydrated veggies to pre-packaged foods like soup in a cup, risotto, dahl, and pre-made pasta boxes. Just because the packaged food you’ve purchased doesn’t include veggies doesn’t mean you have to go without a healthy meal!

You can also use the dehydrator to make vegetable chips, which are great for those looking for a grain-free snacking chip.

Here are a just a few veggies chips you can make:

Using Dehydrated Foods: Herbs

Herbs are something that we usually air-dry simply because most of them will air-dry well. I only have so much space in my dehydrator (and my freeze dryer, for that matter), so if I can hang something upside down to dehydrate it, I will!

Some herbs, however, are too thick or too fibrous to air-dry in my humid climate. Some others simply have better texture when dehydrated.

For example, dehydrated cayenne peppers make fabulous salad and pizza topping. They also mix well into bread recipes, as well as any other recipe that is well-suited to dehydrated vegetables.

• Dehydrated cayenne peppers are also well-suited for use in herbal wellness recipes like this Natural Pain Relief Salve from Simple Life Mom.

Working with dehydrated herbs in wellness recipes for tinctures, salves, and decoctions is much easier because they’re less likely to develop mold or mildew.

Ginger and turmeric are both fibrous rhizomes that need to be thinly sliced to dry evenly. They dry much better in a dehydrator, rather than by air in my climate.

• If you live in a very dry, warm climate, you might be able to air dry them just fine. However, where I live, they would start to mold before they finished dehydrating!
• I like to powder both ginger and turmeric once they’re dehydrated. They’re easy to use in that form.

Another favorite herbal food to dehydrate is mushrooms! Mushroom powder is much cheaper to make at home than to buy.

• And when you rehydrate sliced mushrooms, you get two useful products: the mushrooms and the mushroom water.

When they’re rehydrating, a lot of the flavor of the mushrooms goes into the water, making a kind of “stock”.

This means that you can save it for soups, as well as pasta and rice pots. This mushroom stock should be kept in the fridge and used within a week.

Learn to Preserve Mushrooms 3 Ways Here!

Using Dehydrated Foods: Powders

Vegetable and fruit powders are one of my favorite things about using dehydrated foods! 

I absolutely hate canning tomatoes and tomato products like tomato paste and sauce. Instead, I dehydrate or freeze dry tomatoes, powder them, and then only add the amount of water I need for the recipe.

For example, to make tomato paste using tomato powder, use increments:

1. Mix 2 parts tomato powder to 1 part water.
2. If you need more water, add a spoonful at a time. It’s easier to fix a dry tomato paste than salvage one that’s too wet.

I suggest A Farm Girl in the Making’s article to learn more about making tomato paste, or better yet her book: A Farm Girl’s Guide to Preserving the Harvest.

I own this book and it’s fabulous for all kinds of food preservation methods! The truth is, I use a multitude of methods every year.

How to Make:

Take any vegetable powder and add 2 Tbsp. of it to this great homemade pasta recipe from Love and Lemons. Mix it into the flour before you add the egg.

Or to biscuits, like these simple sourdough discard pumpkin drop biscuits!

• Similarly, take any fruit powder and add 2 Tbsp. of it to sourdough pancakes or fruit scones. Mix the powdered fruit into the flour before the other ingredients. It adds both color and flavor.
• If you’d like more color and flavor, add another few tablespoons. You may need to add a bit of cream or milk to adjust for the extra dry ingredient.

Other Preserved Food Resources 

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