Dehydrating Carrots

 Dehydrating vegetables, namely carrots, is one of the best ways to preserve this nutritional powerhouse!  By dehydrating carrots, you reduce the space they take up as well as make them shelf stable

Carrots are so good for you, rich in Vitamin A plus minerals and potassium!  Whether you grow them in your home garden or pick some up at the farmer’s market or grocery store, it’s worth the time to dehydrate them.

How to Dehydrate Carrots

What is needed to dehydrate vegetables?

A good dehydrator – When dehydrating vegetables, it’s critical that your finished product is completely dry, otherwise it won’t keep very long for you.  Residual moisture will allow mold to grow in your food and destroy all of your hard work.

While there are a lot of dehydrators on the market, I can’t recommend the Excalibur dehydrator highly enough!  I own two of them!

All dehydrators aren’t created equal!

Excalibur dries more food, faster and efficiently, than any other model I’ve tried. 

When I was first looking at buying a dehydrator, I knew that I wanted one that had good ratings and reviews, from a company that had been around for a good long time.  Excalibur has been around since 1973 and manufactures its dehydrators in Sacramento, California.

I also wanted a dehydrator that performed, with accurate temperatures and airflow.  The final product is critical!  If food isn’t dried correctly, it can spoil and go to waste.

Tray size is important to me as well, I don’t like to be restricted by round trays.  I can’t get as much as I need to on them!  My Excalibur trays are 15″x 15″!  That’s 225 square inches per tray!

I got everything I wanted and more, again, I love my Excalibur!  Worth the money, and if you have to save, worth the wait.

Excalibur has a wide variety of sizes and styles available, check them out!

Next, you need fresh carrots. Wash them well, peel and cut to the desired size.

11 Food Dehydrator Recipes

Cut the carrots into 1/8-1/4″ slices, or you could shred the carrots to use in baked goods, like carrot cake or muffins.  Better yet, dehydrate sliced and shredded carrots!

When dehydrating carrots, blanching is required.  Blanching is a brief cooking, in boiling water (3-5 minutes for carrots), followed by a plunge into ice cold water for the same amount of time to stop the cooking.

Start a pot of water and bring to a full boil, then drop your carrots in batches into the water.

How to Can Carrots

Because my slices were thin, I cooked them for 3 minutes, thicker pieces will need 5-7 minutes.  Then I strained them and plunged them in ice water to cool down.

(If you have livestock, you can feed the leftover stock and peels to them, my chickens LOVED it!)

Once cool, strain again and pat the carrots dry.  Then place the carrots on your dehydrator trays and pop them in the dehydrator on the vegetable setting.

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Here’s what dehydrated carrots look like, they lose about 80% of their size and store easily in a mason jar!

Storing Dried Carrots

Because carrots lose so much of their size after dehydrating, 5# of carrots filled up 1/3 of a quart jar!

Store your dried carrots in an air-tight container and in a cool place like your cabinet.

I get a lot of mileage out of my dried foods!  Meal prep is so simple when I can just rehydrate my dried veggies (1 part boiling water to one part veggies) and use them in soups, stews or casseroles.  Dehydrated vegetables make eating well easy!

I hope you’ll try dehydrating carrots, let me know how it turned out for you or any questions down in the comments!

Enjoy!

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