Tag: box fan

The Aji and Jalapeno Flakes are dry – 2010

Posted on by AuSable

It turns out that these flakes dried a lot faster then I had expected, go figure. It only took 4 days for them to dry out completely, and that’s only because I gave the peppers an extra day and half in the dryer, since the shredded Jalapenos were very slow to dry.

Looking over the final product, the Aji turned out much more like a flake from using the normal Cuisinart blade and pulsing the motor. Compared to the Jalapeno flakes in which I used the shredding disc on the Cuisinart. Since the Jalapenos seemed to have clumped up badly during the drying process.

But seeing how I had absolutely no information to start with in executing this cooking experiment. I kind of had to make it up as a went along.

I haven’t tasted any of the flakes to see how they turned out, since I was too busy choking on the capsaicin fumes from the basement. So I’ll leave the taste testing for another time.

Drying Jalapeno and Aji Limon into pepper flakes – October 2010

Posted on by AuSable

As was briefly mentioned in the end of season garden post. I thought that drying these peppers into flakes would be something that you normally don’t see done with either aji limon or jalapenos peppers. Plus I’m just plain tired of canning this season, so drying these peppers is the lazy way of getting them processed into an end product. Continue reading →

Drying Sage in the Box Fan dehydrator

Posted on by AuSable

Since I’ve basically mulched the garden and cleared everything out, I had to do something with the sage plant that was still alive and kicking, even after the killing frost in October. So I basically stripped all the good leaves from the plant and laid the leaves on a screen for the dehydrator to do its thing.

I did end up using a blue furnace filter this time around. I set the fan on medium speed instead of low, but it still took about 7 days to dry a single frames worth of sage leaves. Personally I thought that it would have been a little bit quicker, but go figure.

Drying Basil in the Box Fan Dehydrator

Posted on by AuSable

Now that I have the box fan dehydrator built, its time to dry something. And I just got a bucket full of basil from my farmer neighbor, at first I thought about making it into pesto and freezing it into ice cube trays. But why not put the box fan through its maiden voyage, to work out any kinks.

Well it turns out that the type of filter you use can be a major kink in using a box fan dehydrator. The filter that I started with was a cotton style filter with a MERV 8 rating. The problem with using a filter with that high of a rating was that the box fan wasn’t strong enough to blow its air capacity through the filter. So a majority of the air ended up bouncing off the filter back though the box fan. So what was supposed to take a day to dry out ended up taking five days. So for next time I’m going to use one of those blue furnace filters that has a MERV 2 rating, since a MERV 8 is just overkill in this application. That is unless you are a dust freak/germ-a-phobe, then maybe a MERV 8 is the way to go.

Box Fan Dehydrator – Good Eats style

Posted on by AuSable

I’ve wanted to make a box fan dehydrator for a long time. With a long time being, since I saw the episode of Good Eats, where Alton Brown was making beef jerky with his box fan dehydrator. I already had a box fan in the basement, I just needed to find those cotton filters that he used in the episode. After about a month a searching around town and coming up empty. The project got tossed onto the back burner. Continue reading →