The question of dehydrators

It comes to mind often whether or not I need or want a dehydrator to futher enhance or support my explorations into living and raw foods. The Excalibur, popular among raw foodists have never sat particularly well with me, made from plastic, rather expensive, consuming a lot of electricity and removing all that delicious water from foods. But there are of course great things about owning a dehydrator such as gently warming soups and raw dishes to body temperature and maintaining enzyme activity and making crackers and raw bread conveinently and cheaply...so I've been reconsidering purchasing a dehydrator, especially as part of what I want to do is make food for others as well, and at some point do big dinner events and possibly some catering, so a dehydrator would be well used and useful in my kitchen.
One I had seen before and came across again recently is the Living Foods Dehydrator, it is wooden, beautiful and very well made, it is also adaptable to alternative heat sources such as solar. They are heavy and expensive to ship outside of the US but sell the plans so you can make your own. I also came across this blog post about making your own dehydrator from recycled materials. Awesome, cheap, practical and you can make it to your particular specifications. I might ask my younger brother with amazing carpentary skills if he would help me build one. So inspiring to even consider taking something like this into your own hands. There are also a lot of plans on the net to build your own solar ovens. This is the future. The sun.

Golden flax crackers

I just bought some Nushie's flax crackers from Fruit Pedallers. They are really good, and made in Melbourne. Bit expensive for me to to eat regulary, maybe I should get a dehydrator.

Nushie’s Natural pays high attention to life force as an ingredient. Our ingredients are all enziomatic active so that it costs the body nothing to fully digest. Unless otherwise stated all our products are made from 100% organic ingredients. We do not cook our foods thereby retaining all the natural nutrients of our ingredients. Our principles stem from Life Food Nutrition. And because our products are all plant based they contain no cholesterol.
Nushie's Natural

raw blueberry flax pancakes (you need a dehydrator)

Beet Crepes

Recipe for raw beetroot crepes
Looks quite amazing if you have a dehydrator

Kale Chips

On a small search to find something interesting and achievable (in terms of time and ingredients) for our foray into dehydrating I found this wonderfully written and illustrated recipe for kale crisps on the 'we like it raw' blog. The first part of the recipe was to make massaged kale (with olive oil, garlic, lemon, salt) and then dehydrate it for 6-8 hours and make chips. The massaged kale was deliciously juicy fresh and really nice, the dehydrated version was similiar but without the deliciosly juicy fresh factor, and we had to wait a long time for it to be ready, and in the end wished we had just eaten it fresh. I think in the right circumstances dehydrating would have some benefit but overall seems to complicate the simplicity.

Dehydrating-ing

Keen to try making some kind of dehydrated pizza base and inspired by Holly's Live Pizza and this recipe we launched into our dehydrating adventure. We made the bases quite thin and after the dramatic shrinking affect dehydrating is known to incite, the bases cracked and became 'craquers'. They were pretty good for a first go, though the intense time based nature definately requires patience and fore-and-post thought. We made the bases with a mortar and pestle, a blender may be useful to ensure a more consistant stickability of the fibres. The buckwheat seems to fall apart unless ground really well.

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'Live pizza bases'
1: sprouted buckwheat, grated carrot, garlic, salt, olive and walnut oil, black sesame seeds
2: sprouted buckwheat, grated carrot, garlic, salt, olive and walnut oil, golden flaxseeds, hempseed protein 

in order to fill the dehydrator we also put in a tray of sliced lemons (as a handy lemon tea when travelling) and a tray of blood oranges, with the intention of chocolate dipping