Dehydrating Apples With an MES 40

[maplenut]

I got some apples from my parents and wanted to dehydrate a few to snack on later.
We have a dehydrator but it is a small one and it takes forever to do apples in it.

So I got thinking, could I do the apples in the MES.

So broke out the apple peeler and cored and sliced a bunch of apples. ( sorry i did not get any pic's of that part)

Loaded up the rack for the MES and set the temp to 135 degrees.
I already had made a small fan to sit over the vent on top of the MES when I did jerky the last time so I placed that over the vent and removed the chip loader.

Put in the loaded rack

Had to do a few errands today so that made some of the time go by.
After about 4 hrs I pulled some of the sliced that were on the side with the heating element.

Total time for all the slices to be done was about 7 hrs.

A few of the slices ended up getting a little black smoke stuff on them from the inside of the smoker but it did not harm the taste and flavor of the apple slices.

SO my little experiment seems to work and I will most likely use my MES again to dehydrate things. (I will just brush out the MES before using it for this so that there will not be any of that loose flaky black stuff falling onto the stuff that I am trying to dehydrate.

 

[Winterrider]

Nice experiment !

 

[chopsaw]

Yup . Works good . I do peppers onions and tomatoes in my MES 30 . Grind it into powder .

 

[MJB05615]

That's a great idea! Never even considered it before. You put the Apple slices directly on the grates not in a pan? Nice, thanks for sharing.

 

[MJB05615]

I don't have a fan setup at all. Is that necessary for dehydrating?

 

[thirdeye]

About how many apples is that?

I bought a 5# bag of apples and about 10 zucchini one time and did them in my dehydrator. I took big bag to work. One guy was eating them like potato chips..... then they started to re-hydrate. He learned a valuable science lesson that day.

 

[maplenut]

I don't have a fan setup at all. Is that necessary for dehydrating?

I am not sure if a fan is needed but Any air movement that you can give it the fast it will get done.

 

[maplenut]

About how many apples is that?

I bought a 5# bag of apples and about 10 zucchini one time and did them in my dehydrator. I took big bag to work. One guy was eating them like potato chips..... then they started to re-hydrate. He learned a valuable science lesson that day.

oh boy, I am not sure. The apple trees that my parents have produce small apples, about the size of a baseball or smaller, mostly smaller.
If I had to guess about 20 small apples.
I wish I had 2 more racks in my MES I could have done more.

That is funny about re-hydrating!

 

[thirdeye]

oh boy, I am not sure. The apple trees that my parents have produce small apples, about the size of a baseball or smaller, mostly smaller.
If I had to guess about 20 small apples.
I wish I had 2 more racks in my MES I could have done more.

That is funny about re-hydrating!

I guess you could do a stacked rack jerky set-up if you have some spare racks.... two 2 X 4's on edge sitting on the existing rack to support the spare racks then put more apples on them.

 

[MJB05615]

Did you season the Apples with anything? Or just as they are.