Remember the mule deer that Seth got?
Well, after Sethypoo hauled that big ol’ muley out of the mountains, he decided that we should eat it. It was pretty big, so I was having nothing to do with it. I only eat little deer – they’re nice and tender. (Replace “deer” in that sentence with “children” and I could pass for the witch in Hansel and Gretel).
Anyhoo, he decided that he should just embrace the chewiness and make jerky out of the meat.
So he brought this home:
The Presto Dehydro Food Dehydrator
I was super irritated because I thought he could just use the ovens, but nooooooo, he had to have some fancy drying machine of the hippies.
Seriously, I think the only people that I have ever known to own a dehydrator and actually use it was a family in our home school group who dehydrated bananas when I was a kid. They were very “natural” homeschoolers, so they equaled “hippie” in my mind. We were of course somewhere in that awkward spot between the cool homeschoolers and the over achieving graduate at the age of 5 homeschoolers, so I guess that made us semi-normal?
I digress.
The jerky takes about 4 hours to dry and then Seth puts it in the oven for a little bit.
Once it’s been in the oven for a while the fat melts off and Seth pats it dry with a paper towel before sealing it into a Ziploc and freezing it.
I tried a few pieces and, with all of the jerky seasoning that the meat was marinated in, it was actually quite tasty. Given the price of jerky, this might actually save us some money after deducting the cost of the hunt, license, and dehydrator.
The only problem is that, once the jerky is done, I’m stuck with a dehydrator that I have no idea what to do with. Bananas are out of the question because they are disgusting in both regular and chip form so don’t even suggest them. Blurgalurg!
Does anyone out there use one of these behemoth plastic contraptions and have any idea what I could use it for?
Looks like you need to get your late night infomercial watching on! I can’t remember what his name is, but if you turn the TV on at 1:00, you’re sure to come across the same infomercial that’s been on since we were little girls. And he dehydrated stuff. For sure.
Haha! I bet he could give me a ton of ideas. So far all I’ve come up with is fruit leather, but I’ll need to buy attachments for that because apparently the fruit screens are sold seperately. We might need to build a separate room just to hold everything that comes with this thing!
I remember seeing those infomercials. I was always impressed that you could make fruit roll-ups. Maybe that is something you could try?
I’m definitely going to try fruit rollups. I need a big food processor instead of my tiny one in order to prep them – oh darn….. 🙂 In the meantime, I’m thinking of drying clothes on it….