Let's Dry It

Ann Tudor was the former Managing Editor of Canadian Book Review Annual and had her own Toronto-based crafts company, Honest Threads.

Everything you ever wanted to know about drying foods, including (and especially) recipes for using the dried foods, you can find in this little book. Bernice Neff, who has lived on a Langley, B.C., farm for the last 15 years, grows her own vegetables and calls drying “an inexpensive and self-satisfying experience.”

The first 23 pages describe methods of drying — solar, oven, room, and dehydrators (including instructions for building your own home dryer). This is followed by a section on home-dried vegetables, including a handy conversion chart (X amount of food = X amount dehydrated; X amount dehydrated + X amount of water = X amount reconstituted); a table of instructions for specific vegetables; vegetable leathers; and numerous recipes using dried vegetables. A brief section on drying herbs is then followed by 25 pages on fruits (pre-drying treatment, fruit leathers, and recipes). Finally, four pages tell how to make jerky and fish jerky. The index completes the book.

A very compact guide at a very reasonable price.