I’ve always been fascinated by the process of food dehydration. It’s a marvellous way to preserve food without losing its nutritional power.
It has been long used in military, camping, and adventure expedition circles to preserve hearty nutrient-rich meals for long periods of time. You’ve likely seen those cute little packets of lasagna or fettucine alfredo at camping supply stores – just add water!
But dehydration is not a recent thing. It goes way back in time… back through thousands of years of indigenous cultures drying out nuts, berries, veggies, in the sun – or by smoking meat or fish – for storage, travel, and long term use.
Apart from dehydrating fruits, veggies and meats, there are all kinds of other possibilities ranging from making granola to yogurt. It’s a versatile addition to the kitchen.
Dehydration is a key tool in the raw food movement. Raw food afficionados believe foods cooked above 40–49°C / 104–120°F lose most of their nutritional value because the natural enzymes in the raw food are killed when they are heated above these temperatures. Some neat raw food dehydrator recipes include kale chips, flax crackers, onion bread, and carrot cake. Feel free to also check out our growing Pinterest Dehydrator Recipes Board.
Most dehydrators on the market have plastic trays for holding the food, and many even have plastic interiors. Some interiors are made with plastics like polypropylene or acrylics (e.g., acyrylonitrile butadiene styrene or acyrlonitrile styrene), which are relatively stable, but we still prefer to avoid them for food use whenever possible. And some are even made with polycarbonate plastic, which is made of the toxic endocrine/hormone disruptor bisphenol A (BPA).
Apart from the inherent toxicity, leaching and off-gassing of plastics like polycarbonate, when they are subjected to heat and/or come into direct contact with food they can leach even more readily, especially with oily and acidic foods. We most certainly did not want a dehydrator with polycarbonate, or even “BPA-free”, plastic trays. You can read more in our plastics INFO section about why BPA-free plastics are not necessarily any safer than BPA — some BPA-free plastics exhibit even more hormone-disrupting activity than BPA.
So needless to say, in our ongoing quest for all things non-plastic – and non-toxic – we sought a dehydrator with plastic-free construction and trays.
We found this 10-tray Stainless Steel Plastic-Free Dehydrator with an all-stainless interior and high quality chrome-plated steel trays.
We’ve been experimenting with it, and one of our favorite snacks are lemon-marinated banana chips.
It’s s pretty simple recipe…
- You need a whole bunch of firm bananas – not green and not so ripe that they are getting soft. I used ten for the quantity in the pictures.
- And you also need lemons. I used two for this batch.
- Cut the bananas into small thin slices – about 1/2 a centimetre or an 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch in width – and put them in a wide bowl.
- Cut the lemons in half and squeeze lemon juice all over the bananas.
- Mix them up carefully to keep the bananas as intact as possible. You’re not mushing up bananas for pancakes here; gentle stirring is the rule.
- Then you place the marinated bananas one by one on a sheet of cooking parchment paper (ideally unbleached) cut to fit the metal tray.
- Into the dehydrator they go and you can dehydrate them until they reach the level of dryness that you like. Some like them a little chewy. I did these at 49°C / 120°F for about 12 hours and they were still nice and chewy.
Now, I’d like to give you a little background on parchment paper, and tell you about my parchment-kraft paper experiment which went awry.
From our research so far, all parchment papers we have found are coated with either a plastic or a silicone layer. Silicone is now all over the place in a myriad of products used with food, but we still consider it a hybrid sort of plastic, albeit a relatively stable one for which we have not yet found a suitable non-plastic replacement. We consider silicone relatively safe depending on the use – and you can read more about our take on silicone at our “Is Silicone a Plastic?” page – but it is not completely inert and non-leaching as some would have you believe.
There are natural, unbleached parchment papers out there. Our preferred is likely the If You Care FSC-certified Unbleached Parchment Paper, which does have a silicone coating. The Beyond Gourmet Parchment Paper is also made from unbleached, chlorine-free paper, and has a silicone coating. And Regency Wraps Natural Parchment Paper is made from tree pulp, which sounds great, but it is then coated with what they describe as a “silicone-like coating.” I asked them for details on what exactly the coating is, but they would not tell me because it is a “proprietary” coating they prefer not to disclose.
With this batch of bananas, I thought, “Hey, I’m going be creative and intrepidly non-toxic and do a little experiment using regular unbleached, uncoated kraft paper!” My thought was, maybe that silicone coating isn’t really even necessary – I mean, you’re drying the food out anyway, right? With kraft paper there would be no silicone coating at all, and because the temperatures in the dehydrator are so low, there is no fire hazard (but just the same I monitored it closely, as you should always do with a dehydrator).
Well, that silicone is necessary. As one might expect, the kraft paper soaks up the juices of the food very effectively.
And as you can see in the photo on the right, the result was that the bananas were more or less glued to the paper! Chantal had been skeptical from the start, and as usual, she was right.
Luckily I had done one tray on parchment, so I did have a few nice ones to use for this final photo, and for our son to eat without having to peel/scrape/chisel off the fused kraft paper. I just wish I had done one tray on experimental kraft paper, and the rest on parchment.
Live and learn! And they still tasted great.
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