Day 36: Food Preservation Part II—Drying

Dear Student,

Drying is an ancient form of food preservation that is simple, practical, and is still popular today. It’s perhaps even easier than canning depending on the space you have available.

Dried fruits and veggies are great on-the-go snacks. Dried vegetables can be great additions to soups and stews in the dead of winter… or when this year’s crop comes in late. And dried fruits are a great addition to cereals (both hot and cold), granola, cookies, cakes, and other baked goods.

Dried meats have supported entire civilizations and nomadic cultures for thousands of years. They’re also great portable, protein-rich, healthy snacks. In fact, Mongols raiding under Genghis Kahn are said to have dried and cured meat by placing it under their saddles as they rode, thereby tenderizing it and curing by the salt from their horse’s sweat. (There’s some debate now as to whether this was actually what they were doing or not, but it was observed by Marco Polo and contended for centuries to be true.)

Dried herbs are the cornerstone of modern cooking, and no house is complete without the ubiquitous spice rack. Without dried herbs, our modern recipes wouldn’t be nearly as tasty, considering the impractical prospect of going out to buy fresh herbs for every recipe you make—you’d have to run to the store every night just to give your food some flavor.

While easy to achieve with little equipment in hot, dry climates, you can dry things even in humid climates with the help of dehydrators or ovens.

The primary beauty of dried foods is that they don’t need electricity to keep them from spoiling. The drying process extracts the water from the foodstuffs, forcing any spoilage-causing bacteria, yeast, or mold to go inactive.

The quicker the food dries, the better the taste and nutritional profile of the end result.

Dried foods can be stored for months or years… They can be eaten dry or reconstituted in water to restore most of the original texture of the food.