I have the dehydrator that vitamix used to make and the motor is going. does anyone know of a dehydrator that is round so i can still use the trays that i have?

thanks.

-- Ginger Sznakowski (buzardb8@simflex.com), June 17, 2001

Answers

Hi, Ginger, I have two "drying boxes". One is a Ronco (stackable) that I bought at a yard sale for $2.00. It's good, but slow. The other one I use much more often. Russ made it for me from directions from an old Organic Gardening magazine. He started with a black bread pan; the shallow ones is sides no more than 1/2 inch. Using that as the size, he made a wooden box with a light socket in the back wall for a 100 watt light bulb. I lined the inside of the box with aluminum foil and made a foil tent to go over the light bulb. The directions in the OG mag said to use a cardboard box that fits your pan, but Russ likes to "guild the lily" so he made mine from wood. And the bread pan needs to be black to absorb the heat. When I'm drying jerky or herbs, corn or carrots or whatever, I grease the pan very lightly. Jerky usually takes over night, corn/carrots take maybe as long. Herbs only take a couple of hours. I've had great results with my homemade drying box. I just recently did potato slices on the Ronco because I had so many. It took probably twice as long as my drying box, but it has a lot more surface area than my box. It only real problem I have with the commercial besides the fact that it's plastic, is the trays have openings in them to allow for air flow, but that means if you're drying something with small pieces like corn you need to put down cheese cloth (or something) to keep pieces from falling through. Once I did celery and thought I'd never get the dried celery off the cheese cloth. (LOL). If you'd like I can send you the dementions of my box. Hope this helps. Good luck. Dianne

-- Dianne in Mass (dianne.bone@usa.net), June 17, 2001.

Magic Chef has a round forced air dehydrator that is available at Wal Mart for $19 ($10 on sale). They come with three 15 in trays and a leather sheet.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), June 17, 2001.