Oops-Share your dehydrating nighmares

[carolg]

Let me start. My oops is dehydrating tomatoes right now as we chat. Always used food processor to slice tomatoes for Excalibur dehydrator. Maybe I used the thicker blade last year but tonight it was the thin blade and looked like mush went on to the teflex sheets. I put in stainer before putting them on the sheet as got lots of water from them. They are on the texflex sheets that have holes on them and one on the solid one. What was I thinking when I used the wholly ones? Exercise? Yes, I was headed to the gym rushed, and now back and have a flashback. Too lazy to redo.

Anyone else have any OOPS lessons we can learn from before creating them with dehydrator?
carolg

[Faithfullyfit]

I used my pineapple pulp from my juicer....mixed with a few chopped macadamia, coconut, agave and made some cookies........sounds tasty right?

As a mother of young ones....I recognize some strange smells- so, while these were dehydrating it smelled like one of my children had ....well, thrown up- I hate the word Vomit but that is what it smelled like- it permeated my whole house- I had to take them out of the dehydrator.early - Later, I tasted one- spit it ou and threw all 3 trays in the trash- Macadamias are $13.99 a lb in my area-----so, I will never try to dehydrate any pineaplle mixtures again :eek:

[carolg]

Even though my dehyrator is not close to my bedroom, all night I was inhaling in tomato fumes. I feel drunk on the smell and not loving the feeling either. Also seem to be sensitive to the dehydrator going in the house. Makes me feel drowsy. Not sure if makes sense, but surely feeling that way. I have noticed this before, so going to move it out to another area. The tomatoes are all stuck together now, but I can live with that when they dry. Still good for making sauces too.

carolg

[Live Love Laugh]

I have an old round dehydrator with only 1 fruit tray . One day I was making crackers and thought I could use Waxed paper - what a mistake - everything stuck / melted to the paper , and had to be thrown out . I now only ever buy Parchment paper :)

[Sharon in Colorado]

A lot of them happened when I was dehydrating sweet stuff at too low temps, which caused a lot of fermenting/rotting to go on.

I remember a particular bar recipe which had already turned out poorly, I thought I'd turn them into some kind of caramel bars with bananas and dates as a topping - well, because I dehydrated at really low temps the whole thing turned bitter on me, I took it to a meeting, hoping someone else would eat them and blech - they hated it!

I remember how much of a waste it was. That is when I started halving my new recipes!

[juliebove]

Corn chips. Doesn't seem to matter whether the corn was frozen or not, or what recipe I used. Yuck, yuck, yuck! Have also been having trouble recently with nut cheeses. The first batch of Swiss I made was perfect. Since then, it sticks very badly to the sheet no matter how long I leave it in and I can't flip it over. I just wind up with thick little chunks of the stuff.