Recently, more and more people are concerned about healthy eating. Many have already realized from their own experience the dependence of health and well-being on the quality of those products that make up the daily menu. Therefore, I especially want to preserve the harvest grown by my own hands, or organic vegetables and fruits bought for the occasion.
Electric dryer for vegetables and fruits
Home canning as a way to preserve the harvest
In late summer and early autumn, for many owners of summer cottages or private plots of land, a hot season begins – canning a ripening crop as a way to preserve it. However, those who do not have their own plot also want to prepare compotes and jams from freshly picked fruits and fruits for the winter, make canned vegetables – pickles, marinades and salads, as well as prepare vegetable dressings for soups. Fragrant vegetables and fruits grown and harvested at the height of the season, under the gentle summer sun, have a completely different taste and are incomparably more useful than those that are on store shelves in winter.
A large harvest, which must be harvested and processed in a short period, becomes a real problem for housewives who have to stand at the stove literally all day. In addition, the problem of storage arises, it is good if there is a cellar or a separate cool pantry, but for most city dwellers, such a cellar is replaced by several shelves nailed to the balcony. Well, if we talk about the nutritional value of canned fruit and vegetable preparations, their useful properties, of course, are inferior to fresh products, at least twice.
Drying vegetables, herbs and fruits
Of course, the technology of drying fruits, herbs, vegetables and mushrooms has long been known and is used as one of the ways to preserve them for the winter. But in mid-latitudes, where the number of sunny days is rather limited, only a very small part of the grown crop can be saved in this way. Using electric ovens in this case is also not an option – it is unproductive and expensive. To dry a couple of baking sheets with mushrooms or chopped vegetables, you need to keep the oven on for 7-8 hours, and a couple of handfuls are obtained at the exit.
And here new technologies come to the aid of summer residents and gardeners, as well as those who care about the quality of their food – manufacturers suggest using a specially designed electric dryer for workpieces, which is a multi-tier chamber resembling a double boiler in design.
Types of electric dryers
Those devices that can be bought in stores today are divided into two types: convection and infrared. The principle of operation of the former is based on the contact of moist raw materials with heated air that freely passes inside the chamber and is removed from it by convection; at the exit, the air is more humid than that which enters the chamber at the entrance. In this case, moisture evaporation occurs gradually, starting from the upper layers, but at the same time a dry dense crust forms on top, which significantly complicates and slows down the further drying process, reducing the quality of the resulting product.
In infrared dryers, the rays of this spectrum, penetrating deep into the products, are absorbed inside by the molecules of the liquid, which, when heated, begins to evaporate from the inside, while the process temperature does not exceed 40-60 degrees. Infrared rays are not affected or absorbed by the tissues of the processed products. It is clear that this principle of action allows you to achieve uniform drying of raw materials, preserving as much as possible all its useful and nutritional properties: vitamins, biologically active substances, as well as natural taste and aroma. This technology allows you to preserve up to 80–90% of the properties of the feedstock and restore its physical and chemical properties by simply soaking it in water for 10–20 minutes. The only drawback of such miraculous devices can be attributed only to their rather high cost.
Choose an appliance with a heating element located at the top, in this case, the secreted juice will not get on it, and the dryer will last longer
How to choose an electric dryer
Having decided on how much money you are willing to spend on purchasing a dryer, and therefore on its type, you should pay attention to other parameters of these devices. When going to buy a dryer, keep in mind that the more power, the higher the productivity; for domestic use, the optimal values of this parameter will be from 350 to 450 watts. Most dryers operate in automatic or semi-automatic mode, reducing your participation in the process only to cutting and stacking raw materials on pallets, as well as choosing the optimal mode. The simplest and cheapest devices operate without a fan, using only natural circulation of hot air. The presence of a fan or its absence does not in any way affect the quality of the final product; only the process time depends on it.
The most economical in operation are devices in which there are many pallets, up to 8 pieces, although they will cost more, but not much
When choosing between a plastic and a metal case of an electric dryer, preference should be given to plastic. Such devices are lighter, and, in addition, food is dried in them more evenly, because the plastic is not subject to overheating. Please note that the device has a built-in function of automatic shutdown in case of overheating.