Hi, I’m Amy from the kitchen at the Blue OK. Today I wanted to tell you a little bit about an item that we use a lot here at the Cafe, and that’s our Excalibur Dehydrator.

We are an affiliate with Excalibur which just means if you buy a dehydrator through our website, it helps us out here at the Blue OK. And the reason we chose to be an affiliate with Excalibur is because it’s the dehydrator that I’ve tried and I like it the best out of all the dehydrators on the market.

The reason I really like this one is because it has flat square sheets. So when you want to make something that you roll into a wrap that starts out as a liquid you can spread it, you can pour it right onto this sheet. These are paraflexx sheets that you can actually pour a liquid mixture onto and you can let it dehydrate for a while and then you just take this whole thing, flip it over, and peel the sheet away. It will be sitting on a screen, and that screen lets air go underneath it and over the top of whatever you’re dehydrating. That actually just allows you to get these nice wide sheets. Where some dehydrators have a whole in the middle and you get odd shapes because you have to pull around the outside. And they are just harder to work with.

So, I really like the shape. I like the fact that you can buy a large one if you’re working in a commercial kitchen or feeding a lot of people where you get a lot of trays and you can do a lot of dehydrating at once. Or, if you are one person or a small family you can buy one that has four or five trays, about half this size, and it can fits on the counter kind of underneath your ledge and it’s more compact. And, I also really like that it works well at the low temperatures settings, which means I get to keep my foods living. Some dehydrators, if their temperatures are uneven, you get the feeling that when you pull it out it’s been cooked. It’s actually gotten hotter than it says on the temperature setting. But the Excalibur does a very good job of keeping it at the actual temperature that it says so that you can be sure that the enzymes are still alive in your food.

So, I use this dehydrator to dehydrate all kings of things. I dehydrate buckwheat to make raw flour. I dehydrate olives to keep them throughout the year. Almonds, I sprout them and dehydrate them. I make cookies out of the raw dehydrated flour. I also dehydrate flax seeds. We dehydrate fruits here at the Cafe. A lot of times when the garden is near the end of the summer, we’ll dehydrate the tomatoes, so that we’ll have flavorful tomatoes for the following winter. You can take fruit and make them into fruit rolls and dehydrate those so you’ll have fruit all winter long.
There is just all kinds of things you can do with the dehydrator that really kind of add a little bit to your raw food pantry.

And the other thing you can really do with your dehydrators is sort of add to what tends to be just salads or fruits and vegetables. You can start to make crusts and crackers and chips, breads even. We also make coconut wraps here. We wrap our spring rolls in them, we wrap samosas in them. There is just a ton that you can do with the dehydrator. And we have lots of recipes for those fun things that you can check out on the website. But I just wanted to tell you a little about my favorite dehydrator out there on the market–the Excalibur. And that’s all. If you have any questions for me, please leave them right here on the website. Thanks a lot.