Keep Your Dehydrated Food Fresh

How To Keep Your Dehydrated Food From Going Bad

After harvesting the backyard garden or purchasing a heap of produce from the farmers market, I always have a load of work ahead of me. If I am not cooking with it, then I need to preserve it for a later date. My favorite method is water bath canning, but my second is to make dehydrated food.

Dehydrating, like canning, has many different methods for each type of fruit or vegetable. Some things like cranberries need to be blanched first to pop and then put into the dehydrator. Other things like peppers and apples can be sliced thin and dried without any additional preparation method.

Either way, dehydrating your extra produce is a fantastic way to save your food. Dehydrated foods will reabsorb water from the air if it is not stored correctly in an airtight container.

I have found an easy and cheap way by using my already owned mason jars, lids, and rings. This method is my favorite because they are all reusable with little to no waste until airtight sealing bags. So there is no extra cost for those sealing bags. I can also take out a small amount of dehydrated foods from each mason jar and easily seal the jars back up.

All you need is a FoodSaver FreshSaver Handheld Vacuum Sealing System and the FoodSaver Wide-Mouth Jar and Regular Mouth Sealer. Both the wide and regular mouth sealer fits all mason jars, no matter the brand. You also don’t need a hose attachment for this process. It is cordless, and when it runs out of juice, plug it in and charge it. I believe the newer versions have a docking charging station.

 Using The FoodSaver Jar Sealer

First, make sure your product is fully dehydrated. Moisture in your food is a killer to dehydrated products. Then place the dehydrated food in a clean mason jar, picking the size appropriate for the amount you plan on storing. Next, fit a mason jar metal lid on top of the jar like normal and push the appropriately sized sealer on top of the lid and jar.

Once the sealer secured on top, place the handheld vacuum directly on top of the white jar sealer. There is an indented circle around the open hole in the middle. Line up the vacuum on the circle. Press the button, and you will hear the vacuum pulling out the air. The tone will change when you have removed all the air from the jar. The process takes no more than thirty seconds.

Pull the white jar sealer off slowly from the jar and test the seal. The center of the lid needs to be indented like in canning. You should be able to hold your jar from the lid, and it not come off. Store the sealed jars in a dark, cool, and temperature-controlled place with metal rings replaced.

And there you have it, a cheap and easy way to keep your dehydrated goods fresh for a long time. This also is wonderful for store-bought dry goods like rice, pasta, flour, sugar, etc. The sky is the limit.

We love to hear from you, so comment down below. Check out how to dehydrate a few garden produce to put into your new sealing systems. We love to dehydrate peppers, cabbage, and summer squash.