Converting recipes from fresh to dehydrated ingredients

Barb LeeContributor - May 8, 2021

I hope some might find this (partial) conversion chart for converting recipe ingredients from fresh to dehydrated foods helpful.  As I try new foods in the dehydrator, I weigh the prepared raw ingredients before and after drying.  I find that I can convert most ordinary recipes by weighing the measured amount of fresh ingredients , substituting the appropriate amount of dried, and adding an appropriate amount of liquid to rehydrate the dried. 

Before I started compiling the list, I accumulated a whole lot of dried foods without any real idea what to use them for.

I really enjoy making “kits” with dried ingredients, that I can mostly just toss in a pot without scrounging around for all the ingredients.  Just made a pot of chicken soup from a “kit”, using canned chicken and broth.

If anyone knows of a more definitive list, I’d love to know about it.  I didn’t find a lot of luck searching the internet.

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What a creative idea Dogpatch! So if i’m reading this correctly, if a recipe calls for 1 medium onion, you would use 1/4 cup of your dehydrated onion?

I also see that you have spaghetti sauce on there. How do you dehydrate that?

I don’t know anything about dehydrating, so teach me your ways!!!

 

Yes to your question on onions.

Sauces like spaghetti sauce, apple sauce, etc. are dried on either a “leather sheet”, which isn’t made out of leather!  LOL!  The dried product is called leather. It may be made out of silicone so as to be somewhat nonstick and is sold especially for food dehydrators.  I’m not too crazy about the off brand ones I bought for my Excalibur dryer.  Another option is to use sheets of parchment paper. The dried sauce is usually flexible, (apple and other fruit leathers, etc.) or may be quite brittle.  You can do tomato sauce this way.  Some back packers dry things like chili.  Anything containing meat needs some special treatment because it spoils easily due to fat content, so the sauce in the list above contains no meat.