3 Ways to Dry Zucchini

Are you looking for zucchini recipes? Are you tired of chocolate zucchini cake?  Zucchini relish? Zucchini in your pasta sauce?  Are you locking your car doors when you drive into town in case zucchini follows you home?  Take that prolific blessing of zucchini and dry some zucchini for winter.  Don’t waste the abundance. Here are more zucchini recipes

You can use it in soup, sauces,  and baking to give you more nutrition in winter soups, more fibre and vitamins in your winter muffins and cakes.

Plus it’s super convenient to have dried zucchini to add to the crockpot where the soup is simmering for lunch.

 

How do you dry zucchini?

You’ll need a dehydrator if you live in a humid climate.  If you live in the desert you can use the sun, but cover your food with a screen to keep insects from laying their eggs in it.

 

Prepare the zucchini for drying

If you have tender young zucchini just slice it.  There are no seeds to remove and the peel is soft.  Slice it into coins about 1/8th inch thick and layout in a single layer on your dehydrator trays.  Dry as you usually would.

If your zucchini is a little bigger, but the skin is still soft like the zucchini in my basket, the seeds are still immature so you can grate it or cube it with the skin still on.  If you find any hard seeds, beginning to mature, remove them before you prepare the zucchini for drying.  There won’t be too many seeds at this stage.

If you are working with zucchini with hard skin and the beginning of seeds, you’ll want to remove the seeds and surrounding pulp first.  Then peel the hard skin off and compost it or feed it to livestock.  Slice the tender, white flesh.  You can slice this into narrow cubes or grate it into shredded zucchini for drying.  Shredded zucchini tends to disappear in soups and acts as a thickener.  Cubed zucchini holds its shape.

Dry the zucchini

Lay the zucchini out in a single layer on your dehydrator trays.  Dry until it is hard and crisp.  About halfway through the drying time rotate the trays by moving the top trays to the bottom of the dehydrator and turning the front of each tray to the back.  Zucchini is so moist that it’s important that you don’t interrupt the drying time so that the zucchini is allowed to desiccate without any additional bacteria being allowed to proliferate.

Zucchini is done dehydrating when it is dry and crisp.

Turn off the dehydrator once your zucchini is dry.  Allow it to cool completely.

Store it in glass jars with a tight-fitting lid, to keep moisture and vermin out.

How to use dried zucchini

• Add it to soup
• Add it to tomato sauce
• Grind it to powder and add it to smoothies
• Use the grated and dried zucchini in baked goods like muffins, quick breads, scones, and yeast bread — yes, you can make chocolate zucchini cake in January.
• Use the grated and dried zucchini as a filler for ground meat, in sausages, hamburgers, and meatballs
• Mix it with cottage cheese or ricotta cheese and use it as a filling in blintzes, lasagna, and perogies

This is just the beginning of all the uses of dried zucchini.  It has a bland flavour and the kind of texture that thickens sauces and soup without adding excess carbohydrates or sugars.

Food safety

Dried vegetables can be stored without refrigeration as long as they remain dried.  They provide stable shelf life for 2 years or more as long as they remain dry and free of insects.  Store them in glass jars with tight-fitting lids to keep insects out.

Once they are reconstituted they need to be treated as any raw food.  Refrigerate unused portions or freeze.

 

Which dehydrator should I use?

Shopping for a dehydrator?  This is the one I recommend.

 

How to get the most from your dehydrator with recipes

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