For many years I have been using a Nesco dehydrator for jerky, corn, banana chips and potatoes. All items I use for outdoor cooking. The jerky and corn for making caldillo (soup) the bananas for Dutch oven muffins and the potatoes I rehydrate and either fry or bake with cheese and dried onions. Recently wanting to diversify and add to my pantry stash I made tomato sauce powder. Cooked up a batch of sauce, used no oil and then dried it until I could blend it into powder. Rehydrated some and it makes a great sauce. Added it to a batch of texas style chili and worked well. However it makes really bad, so hard I have to dig it out of the mason jar. I am using wide mouth jars and putting in 600cc of o2 absorbers. Anyone have any ideas to keep it from caking. Also wanted to make apple sauce powder. Tried jarred sauce, could not get it dry enough to powder in the blender. I am thinking too much sugar. Will try again will fresh apples this fall. Want to try vegetable powder next. Any suggestions would be great. My quest to learn more about dehydrating is to so I can store food in freezing conditions without having the worries I would with canned good . Keeping a food stash at my retreat is an issue because if the freezing temperatures and not being out there fulltime I dont keep on 24/7.
There is a solution for tomato sauce powder that cakes that doesn't require adding anti-caking ingredients. Divide the powder out into convenient amounts--1 cup, 1/2 cup, or whatever. Bag each lot into a loose bag of cling wrap. Tape the twisted end of the bag closed. It should be soft so it will stack flatten out and the bags will stacl like hamburgers, rather than round like baseballs. Stack the bags neatly into a bulk container--large-mouth jar or Xmas tin, or similar. There will be very little wasted space. Put one sheet of paper between each layer to keep the bags from keying together. Pull out however many bags you need at a time, open them up and dump them in the pot Use a partial bag if needed, then just re-twist and seal the remainder until next time. No natter how hard they set in their bags, they'll empty out easily, turn back into sauce in hot water, and you won't have to fight to get the right amount out of the bulk container.
@UncleMorgan it is a good means of portion control...only a sufficient amount needed for the recipe / number of diners the meal is being prepared for is taken from stock...it also makes stock taking one's ingredient larder easier to manage and make restocking decisions upon.
the issue with apple sauce would be it turns to fruit leather, just dehydrate apple slices and they will blend into powder. because they have sugar in them they will clump, its not moiture content (usually) but the sugar. you just wack them and they will fall apart, maybe the same trick above would work here as well. put them in a mason jar and vacuum seal them with an obsorber. vegie powder would be simalar to apples, you need to dehydrate them and then turn to powder but you need to do some sifting to get the big peices out after the first blend and reblend. i dont think either the apples/fruit or veggies would work like the tomatoes where you make the sauce first and dehydrate that... these need to be "whole" and then ground.
