The Best Food Dehydrator for Professional and Domestic Foods
Food Dehydrator are very useful for food storage and for a healthy diet, they allow to dry fruit, vegetables, mushrooms, peppers, legumes and fresh pasta without the need for additives and preservatives.
The dryer acts by dehydration, eliminating water from food and preserving food but maintaining its nutritional properties like vitamins and mineral salts are not destroyed by high temperatures, cooking, or freezing. Let’s see how to choose the best food dehydrator for your needs and the best-quality models on the market.
Buying a food dehydrator consumes electricity to conserve food and obtain good and healthy food. The dehydrator uses a rapid dehydration process that protects the vitamins and minerals in food, preventing mold formation, the proliferation of bacteria, or contamination that could lead to food exposure to the open air.
The food dehydrator is very useful for storing seasonal fruit and vegetables. Whether they come from our vegetable garden or are bought at the market, we can easily store stocks by drying them with a dryer.
Apart from conservation, we must consider another important advantage of drying: adding healthy food to the diet using a new taste. Would you please think of the dried apple or banana slices?
They are excellent snacks that can easily replace more caloric foods. Also, think of chilies or dried mushrooms in many recipes when it is a no longer season and buying them becomes expensive (or are frozen or dried through an industrial drying process and cost more).
Yet, all the fresh pasta, such as noodles or homemade gnocchi in abundance, can also be frozen but keeps the right consistency and the past’s rustic flavor.
Finally, spices, a type of food in drying, find the best use: we can dry rosemary, oregano, sage, garlic, basil, ginger, and many other spices to be used if necessary.
How to Choose the Food Dehydrator: Types and Characteristics
The first thing to understand is if we need a professional or homemade food dehydrator to choose the best food dehydrator. The first case is perfect if we have a vegetable garden, fruit trees, or buy food in quantity.
So we need a large, powerful dryer that can simultaneously work with multiple products. Instead, we have to dry the mushrooms a couple of times a year or the spices grown in pots. It is a fine food dehydrator for homemade food with a more contained capacity. Let’s see what the main characteristics of food dehydrators are.
Structure: The food dehydrator can have a cylindrical shape similar to a steamer or a rectangular like a small oven. Inside, it contains extractable shelves, or baskets, to be filled with food.
Air flux: Hot airflow can be vertical from bottom to top or horizontal. The horizontal flow allows you to dry different foods at the same time. We can then insert different fruits and vegetables on the shelves and dry them without running the risk of mixing the smells.
In the vertical airflow, we can place the most resistant foods on the lower shelves and the more delicate ones on the higher shelves for more effective drying. In this type of dryer, keeping the same foods, such as only fruit, vegetables, meat, or fish is preferable.
Capacity: Household dryers generally can dry up to 3 kg divided into shelves, usually from 3 to 5. Professional dryers have a greater capacity and can have 10 shelves or more.
Power: The power of a dehydrator goes from 250 Watts up to 1000 Watts. Electrical consumption is not to be neglected, and like other appliances, we should use it fully to avoid waste. Lower power means an increase in drying times.
Baskets and trays: The baskets can be wide or narrow, while the trays have a whole surface that allows the collection of liquids. In some cases, it is possible to place the parchment paper on the tray. The baskets or trays must be removable to guarantee cleaning and insert foods that require different drying times to extract some trays in advance.
Temperature: The temperature is adjustable, and it is always advisable to insert foods that need similar temperatures and drying times. In general, the temperature of the dryers is between 86 and 160°F. Therefore, it is always advisable for the best results to check the right temperatures for each food or category of food, not subject them to excessive heat.
Temperature and drying times are reduced considerably in proportion to the food’s size to cut the larger ones into slices or wedges, depending on the needs.
The best food dehydrator
We have selected the 10 best models currently on the market to select the best food dehydrator.
A good dehydrator ranges between $40 for economic dryers and $300 for more powerful high-end food dehydrators.
The best professional dryer is Excalibur, suitable for large quantities of food, with 1000 watts of power and nine shelves. Hamilton Beach is one of the most-used household dryers because it is effortless to manage and set up.
Below is the ranking of the 10 best food dehydrators with technical characteristics and prices.
Product prices and availability are subject to change. Therefore, any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply to purchasing any products.