Snackmaker Ezidri

very pleased. reliable and easy to use.

I now have a Snackmaker and the FD1000 Ultra. The girls behind this firm are excellent and the posting is very quick. The dehydrators themselves are of excellent build quality and are simple to operate. My garden is only around 20 feet by 60 feet, but I can provide vegetables for the whole year, far more efficiently than before. I used to freeze veg, then throw bags away as they got frost damage or because they did not cook well. Not anymore. Of the 21 types of fruit and veg I grow, I dry 14 and could dry 4 more. A glut of tomatoes, no problem, cook them down and make rollups, (leathers). Loads of cooking apples, save them as slices for pies or make into sauce and make into rollups. The saving in space is tremendous. I no longer fill the freezer with Runner beans, they fit into just a couple of Vacuum packs. Yes, I still put them in the freezer, but that is because they keep longer the colder and darker they are. Truly the Ezidri is the best dehydrator. You can have a tower of up to 30 trays on the FD1000 or 15 on the Snackmaker. Most I've had is 28 on the FD1000. Why two you may ask? The Snackmaker is smaller and I can keep it on the kitchen table and use as required. The FD1000 is brought downstairs when the main 'flush' of vegetables arrive to cope with the mass. The FD1000 can have it's temperature set for auto switching on at night, where as the Snackmaster has to be selected when it is turned on. I wholly recommend them to any gardener.

Ezidri Food Dehydrator made New Zealand company Hydraflow Industries.These dryers work very well indeed.Extra trays are available so you can stack them up to 15 trays on the Snackmaker 500 or 30 trays on the Ultra FD1000. You can also get Mesh sheets to dry very small things, and smooth solid sheets to dry puree or yoghurt type foods.These fit over the slats on the trays. The air is faned over the food from the sides, constantly moving to evaporate the moisture.There is a Instruction Book on how to work it, with tips and Recipes to help get the best results. You can also purchase books on Food Dehydrating on Amazon.I had to get my Ezidri from Australia as at the time they wern't available in the UK. This made it more expensive, but at least I have a very good Dehydrator that works well. They are more expensive than some others but they do actually do a proper job.

I have a huge patch of raspberries and strawberries in my garden and find that picking and processing them can be incredibly time consuming. I love them fresh, but even I can't eat 3lb of raspberries every night for a month. I've tried freezing them, making jam, raspberry spirits and all kinds of other ways of dealing with them. I even resort to giving them away to my neighbours and colleagues.I decided that a food dehydrator might be another way of dealing with the excess. After a lot of research, I plumped for the Ezidri, which I've had for a couple of months now. Actually, drying raspberries whole isn't the best thing to do with them, so after the first couple of batches I ended up making a lot of fruit leathers instead.The drier is easy to put together and use. Trays stack on top of each other and there is a mesh insert for smaller items and a solid base for liquids. I cut up some silicon oven liners to make more tray liners for leathers.So far I've dried raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, apples, cherries and kiwis. Getting the slices even thickness can be difficult by hand, which means things don't dry evenly, but the results have mostly been great. I must admit, dried kiwi fruit isn't my favourite. Fruit leathers are easy - just bung everything into a liquidiser and whizz it up, then spread it over the solid tray.I'm looking forward to the apple harvest to try out more things, but in the mean time, I may well dry some lavender for lavender bags and next year, I shall dry the roses.One last thing - the suppliers are lovely. They emailed to say they had my order and would dispatch my snackmaker after the weekend, but then emailed again to say they'd got the courier to pick it up early, so I got it in a couple of days, in time to play with it over the weekend.