Preserve It Naturally: A Complete Guide to Food Dehydration

This book is really well thought out. The chapters are clear and include beautiful photos and many ideas for using dehydrated products. Really recommend this if you planning on starting!

We got this book to accompany the Excalibur dehydrator that we'd recently purchased, and which comes with only very basic instructions. This book is the Excalibur official publication, but is perfectly well-suited to any type of dehydrator so long as it has a temperature control.Much of this book is very good indeed. It explains very clearly how to pre-treat fruit and veg, meats and fish, and pretty much anything that you might want to dehydrate. It helpfully classifies things into those that are excellent candidates for drying, those that are good, fair, and poor. It gives guidelines for temperatures and times (although you may wish to customise these to your own local conditions). I would have liked to see more detail in the section on fruit leathers to cover pastes like membrillo, and on making vegetable crisps, but it's not too difficult to build on the information in the book to create your own methods.So really the first two thirds of the book rates 5 stars. I've taken the overall rating down to 4 stars because of the final third, which is devoted to recipes. The first recipe is for Hot Tuna and Yogurt Dip, which pretty much tells you all you need to know. The recipes are firmly rooted in North America, and they're hopelessly outdated and unappealing. I found the sections on preparing dried mixes for camping and on preparing petfoods quite interesting, but otherwise the recipes are so much waste paper. (Of course, if your response to Hot Tuna and Yogurt Dip was to think, "That sounds yummy!" then I apologise - just up my rating to 5 stars.)So, recipes apart, a "must have" for dehydrator owners, especially Excalibur enthusiasts.

Excellent volume; great information, inspiring, comprehensive, great for beginners and more advanced users of dehydrators. First class.

This is an excellent book that goes into a lot of detail about how do dehydrate just about anything. It also includes recipes for your pets.

This book is such a great help, although it should come with the dehydrator!Great idea's and how to do things, best book I have found!

perfect book just what was needed

Excellent

Very informative, looking forward to getting started.