Sunday, January 8, 2012

I Love This - Commercial Dehydrator Critique

By Gabriella Watson


Please, if your dog loves jerky like mine, don't buy the stuff in the stores (about 95% of them are made in china), buy this instead, and it will pay for itself in a very short time, and you know what you are giving your dog is safe. Also recommend buying a recipe book, does come with a few recipes, but I like to try different things.

We bought this in 2008, and used it only twice before packing it away in its original box for storage. Slightly more than year later, we unpacked and set it up to dry tomatoes from the garden.

I've made several batches of jerky, which the whole family enjoys. I've also dehydrated onions, apples, herbs, tomatoes (de-seeded and squeezed a little to remove some of the liquid), green peppers, garlic, squash, cherries, strawberries, green beans, corn and even cantaloupe.

I love beef jerky more than anything. I just hate paying the high price to buy it. It's a smart design to place the fan on top lid as the juice came out from meat or fruit won't make the fan dirty. The drying racks are dishwasher safe and fit into our dishwasher quite easily for easy cleaning. It's very powerful, so be careful to not have this on a circuit that may already be overloaded. But, in being powerful, it dries everything faster than the manual actually says. The fan does make noise but it's pretty quiet. I could still watch TV even with the Nesco running. It says in the manual "firm but not brittle" that is just not enough info for me. Regardless, even with a few pieces under-dried, this has kept me well fed on my backpacking trips and in the office.

This great little machine did exactly what I wanted it to do...It dehydrated my homemade lasagna for backpacking trips. Three trays of very cheesy lasagna dried in 7 hours. Ordered the jerky gun, extra trays and tray inserts a few days after this - if I had it to do over, I would order all at the same time. Everyone loves my jerky made from hamburger. I purchased a dehydrator to make healthy treats for my dogs. This Nesco was chosen based on other reviews. It does take a while to dehydrate the product. I did some bananas and it took the longest time recommended. While it was said to dry foods in a fraction of the time that a cheaper unit would require to do it, our experience has not been consistent with this expectation. The Nesco is an attractive unit with seemingly nice features, but our experience with its performance suggests it is about the same as any other similar unit. I can honestly tell you that for the price, with this dehydrator, you get exactly what the average person needs for effective and efficient small to medium sized batch drying. of course, I wish it had an on/ off switch and a timer, but you can get a timer/ power control (similar to what you'd use for Christmas lights) and use that so it's not a deal breaker for me- especially at this price.

I dehydrated food for a canoeing trip once as a kid and hadn't dehydrated food since then. I'm such a terrible cook that anything I try to make can set the house on fire (seriously).




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