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Make ShiftI've been thinking about how we would be able to dry things without electricity and our commercial
dehydrator. The design to our commercial dehydrator is very simple. It has a heating coil at the bottom
and drying racks above that. Almost anything could be used for the racks. Old window screens is what I
have in mind. Of course, you would want to clean them thoroughly first. Build or obtain a wooden case to
hold your drying racks. I thought that an old chest of drawers might do nicely. This would give you
significantly more space than my commercial dehydrator and make it convenient to check your dried
goods. Knock out the bottom of your chest of drawers to allow the heat from the "heating element" to rise
through your drying foodstuffs.
When we dry food we will mostly dry things in increments. We will turn it on for a while, then turn it off
to allow things to cool for a while. I don't know if this is good or bad, but we burn a lot less this way.
This same effect could be achieved by adding fire heated rocks to a pit dug below the chest of drawers. If
you wanted to smoke things with this same set up it should be fairly easy to build a fire in the pit instead.
Of course, be careful not to build too hot a fire or you'll burn your drying box. You don't really want a big
or a hot fire when you're smoking things anyway. Maybe moving hot coals from your fire to the pit and
then adding grass or twigs to smoke the food would work best.
Offered by John.
