In my opinion, the Number One reason to own a dehydrator is for snacks that taste good.
The recipes on this page are simple quick snacks — for recipes that take longer (use blender or food processor) like crackers and cookies — see Blended Recipes for Dehydrator.
Raw fruit and nuts get boring. Besides, nuts are high-fat. You feel much better when you eat low-fat — that’s carbohydrates like fruit and sprouted grain crackers.
I need my home-dried fruit (apples, bananas, yum) and crackers — sweet oatmeal cookies, savory carrot-cake, and nachos chips — all raw.
My dogs and cats love crackers too. I give them the ones with less dried fruit, like oat-date which is mostly sprouted grain. They’d normally eat pre-digested grains in the stomach of a bird.
Raw Snacks
Dehydrated snacks are healthy for you. They restore your teeth instead of destroying them. They’re fun to give to family and friends!
So many times I’ve been with friends where my dried snacks were the party hit! People love raw food when it tastes divine.
It’s so quick to make them. You can even dry high-protein Energy Soup — recipe is here. If you can blend it, you can dehydrate it!
Please feed your family and friends delight-full food, free of synthetic chemicals, because you control what you are drying.
Fruits
Fruits taste sweeter when safely dried at low temperature. With store-bought dried fruit, you never know what temperature it was dried at.
Fruits dried at home below 115°F are especially nourishing because all the minerals and vitamins in fresh fruits become highly concentrated in the dried product.
Commercial growers, even sun-dried organic, cannot select the very best fruits to dry. You can. Sweet sun-rich nutrient-rich fresh fruits become great-tasting dried fruits. Make your favorite fruits last all the year round! Also summer herbs like dill, parsley and basil.
Rhio reports in her recipe book Hooked On Raw (#ad) that since the early 1960’s all dried shredded coconut sold in stores, is pasteurized to give it an indefinite shelf life.
Coconuts are the only source of saturated fat for vegans, besides the fat our body itself makes. They’re especially important for body-builders. Coconut is delicious in raw ice cream.
To preserve your own supply of coconut:
- Wash and grate fresh coconut meat, spread on mesh dehydrator screens, and dehydrate at 105°F (40°C) until very dry. Keeps up to six months in a glass bottle in refrigerator.
- Blend fresh pineapple, banana, dried coconut and raw honey, and freeze it in small one-inch high tubs, for hot summer days.
To convert Fahrenheit (F) into Celsius (C) — it’s, e.g., 105°F minus 32 multiplied by 5, divided by 9 = 40°C
Vegetables
Dehydrating removes the water, so flavors are deliciously concentrated.
Veggies you can spice up even more, for instance:
- Thinly slice raw zucchini (baby marrow)
- Dip in soya sauce like Nama Shoyu or Bragg Liquid Aminos (neither sauce is raw)
- Sprinkle with garlic or onion powder, and
- Dehydrate into zingy chips
What a difference from a fattening bag of fried potato chips!
Alissa Cohen in Living On Live Foods (#ad) loves sweet potato chips. Peel the sweet potatoes, then slice in any machine that makes them thin, spread on mesh screens and dehydrate at 105°F for 4-5 hours or until crispy.
Cheesy Chips
From Alissa Cohen’s Living On Live Foods (#ad). The nutritional yeast gives extra vitamin B and a cheese taste:
- 2 medium sweet potatoes
- 1/4 C water
- 1/4 C Bragg Liquid Aminos
- 1/2 – 1 C nutritional yeast.
Combine water and Bragg’s in a large bowl. Marinate potatoes (peeled + sliced) in this for five minutes or longer. Drain chips and lay flat on mesh screen, dust with yeast or coat heavily for a real cheese flavor. Dehydrate at 105°F for 8-10 hours or until crispy.
Hot Chips
From Alissa Cohen’s Living On Live Foods (#ad). Add cayenne or chili powder to the degree of kick you want.
- 2 medium sweet potatoes
- 1/4 C olive oil
- 1/4 C lemon juice
- 1 tsp cayenne pepper and/or chili powder
Combine oil and lemon juice in a bowl. Place potatoes (peeled + sliced) in it so they get nicely coated. Drain chips and lay flat on mesh screens, sprinkle with hot spice. Dehydrate at 105°F for 8-10 hours or until crispy.
Salt + Vinegar Chips
From Alissa Cohen’s Living On Live Foods (#ad). Satisfies a craving for potato chips!
- 3-4 regular potatoes
- Raw apple cider vinegar, e.g. Bragg
- Himalayan crystal salt
Place potatoes (peeled + sliced) in a large bowl with enough apple cider vinegar to cover them, soak for 10-15 minutes. Drain chips and lay flat on mesh screen, sprinkle with salt. Dehydrate at 105°F for 5-10 hours or until crispy.
You know, a quick way to eat potatoes if you’re transitioning to raw, is to slice into thin slices, steam for 2-3 minutes and sprinkle with natural salt. You want to cook as low, slow and quickly as possible, to retain the most nutrients, e.g. it’s best to sprout chickpeas or soya beans and steam them for 5 minutes, rather than cook them for hours. Steamed chickpeas (garbanzo) are deliciously sweet!
Unroasted Nuts – Curried Almonds
Thank you to Dr Gabriel Cousens book Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine (#ad) for these delicious seasoned nuts!
- 4 C almonds, soaked 5-8 hours
- 1 Tbsp curry spice
- 1/2 C water
- 2 tsp Himalayan crystal salt
- 1 tsp cayenne pepper
Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Stir well and dehydrate overnight at 115°F.
Ginger Almonds
From Dr Gabriel Cousens, Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine (#ad).
- 4 C almonds, soaked 5-8 hours
- 3 Tbsp ground ginger
- 2-1/2 Tbsp curry powder
- 1 Tbsp Himalayan crystal salt
- 1/2 tsp cayenne
Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Dehydrate at 145°F for 2 hours and then 115°F for 8 hours.
One thing I’d like to try is to soak almonds in freshly made apple + ginger juice (my favorite juice!) for 4-5 hours, then dehydrate. I’d rather leave out the curry powder and cayenne, and get a true ginger-tasting nut. Perhaps a little lemon juice too? Let me know if you get the right gingery mix 🙂
Dulse Sunflower Seeds
From Dr Gabriel Cousens, Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine (#ad).
- 3 C sunflower seeds, soaked 3-4 hours
- 1 C dulse flakes
- 1 Tbsp Himalayan crystal salt
Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Dehydrate at 145°F for 2 hours and then 115°F for 8 hours.
Sunflower are a good source of omega-6 essential fatty acids. Dulse, a sea vegetable, will give you the complete range of trace minerals and iodine. Sea veggies are good for chelating heavy metals out of the body.
Grain Crunchies
For a high-protein crunchy snack, grow lentil or buckwheat or quinoa sprouts in the easy GoGreen Automatic Sprouter.
Then soak sprouts in soya sauce or Braggs Aminos for 2 hours, spread out on mesh sheets, and dehydrate at 105°F for 24 hours. Buckwheat is my favorite, it’s crunchy yet melts in your mouth.
I dehydrate the quinoa sprouts at 5° lower temperature because they look so sensitive! I always use the Taylor digital thermometer to check I’m drying at the correct temperature.
These days I’ve gone off soya sauce, Nama Shoyu and Braggs Aminos. I don’t enjoy their taste any more. They reportedly all have MSG. Even if they don’t, they’re an ugly factory food. Do they look like the original soya bean?
For buckwheat crunch, I prefer to:
- Soak raw buckwheat groats for half-an-hour — no longer! even quarter-hour is ok — the raw is golden in color, whereas cooked buckwheat (kasha) is brown, it won’t sprout.
- I use 4 cups of groats — one cup per one-quart mason jar (so 4 jars). This makes enough sprouts to spread out on my six L’Equip trays.
- After soaking for half-hour, drain, then sprout them for a day until they have nice long shoots — sometimes a night too if the weather’s very cold, rinse every 12 hours.
- Dry them to bone dry in dehydrator using the mesh liners — about 24 hours, they dry quickly.
- Store the dried sprouts in glass jars with an oxygen absorber in each jar (the little sachets you get in vitamin bottles).
- Pour some into a bowl, mix it with your favorite seasoning like cajun or pizza, then eat by the spoonful.
- You can also mix it with almond milk for breakfast cereal, perhaps add a touch of apple pie spice?
I like Frontier Herbs for the best organic fair-trade seasoning blends. Love their apple pie spice and pizza seasoning!
My favorite seasoning with crunchy dried buckwheat sprouts is Mock Parmesan Cheese. One cup of cashews + 1.5 tsp Himalayan salt + 1 tsp dried oregano + 1/2 tsp dried basil + 1 tsp garlic powder + 1/8 tsp hot red pepper flake.
Blend into a powder. Add red pepper for heat, oregano for richer herb flavor — the pizza herb!
This combo — buckwheat crunch with mock parmesan — freed me from my addiction to chips. I never buy potato chips (or corn chips) any more.
Actually today I more often use my own home-made gomasio grind, recipe here.
Raw Pasta
For raw pasta, sprout wheatberries for a couple of days until the short thick shoot is about the length of the berry (not the long hair-like rootlets).
Then grind the sprouts in the Samson Juicer using the noodle nozzle, to give you long thin ropes, which you can spice up and even braid first, then dehydrate at 110°F — no higher, because enzymes die at 118°F.
Raw Condiments
All spicy sprouts can be dried, ground and used as fresh living condiments to spice up your foods. Thank you to Sproutman’s Kitchen Garden Cookbook (#ad)for this idea.
Sprout garlic, radish, cabbage, onion or mustard seeds for a couple of days, dry the sprouts at 105°F for 2-3 hours, grind in a coffee grinder, and keep each one refrigerated in glass condiment jar. If any is too spicy, mix with sprouted alfalfa for milder taste.
Frederic Patenaude in his great set of DVDs for Lowfat Raw Recipes (#ad) dehydrates red cabbage, celery and leek for use as condiments.
Save Money
Bottled and canned food must be used up once you open it. Dried foods last for months in a jar and lose no nutrients.
Buy fruit and veggies cheaply in season. Dehydrate in bulk, then all year round enjoy their burst of flavor and fresh nutrition.
Dehydrating fits more food into less space — you can dry 25 pounds of tomatoes down to 1-2 lbs and fit them all in a one-quart jar.
Eat Local, Reduce Pollution
When you dehydrate local produce in season, you enjoy dried whole tomatoes, marinated dried tomatoes and tomato leather in the winter, and you’ve not consumed the huge energy of importing tomatoes.
When I still ate cooked pasta, then instead of using pasta sauce from a jar, I simply added dried tomatoes and fresh onions to the pasta while it simmered a few minutes. Then raw garlic and olive oil when removed from stove. Yumm, delicious! Bottled sauce is a machine food, don’t eat it.
You can dry almost anything that contains water — items you may never have considered, such as tofu. And of course herbs and flowers for potpourri and flower arrangements. Excalibur with its removable trays, is best for this and for drying craftwork.
Enjoy the Great Outdoors
Dried foods are tasty, nutritious, lightweight, easy to prepare, easy to carry, and easy to use when traveling or back-packing. They’re 100% WHOLE foods, no machine food here.
Machine food is making everyone so sick. Your body wasn’t made by a machine. It’s crying for the finely balanced nutrition of Mother Nature, where choirs of LIVING vitamins, minerals and proteins sing together in heavenly harmony.
Nature’s food will have you singing and dancing! In the first month, you’ll notice the amazing power of raw and living foods to transform your life.
Fruit leather is a hit with sugar-loving children — and frees them from addiction to white sugar, chemicals and preservatives. Strawberries and pineapple taste like high-priced candy yet are so nutritious and healthy.
Discover More
- Slower Blended Dehydrator Recipes — for tasty crunchy healthy raw food.
- How to Restructure Your Water — discusses pros & cons of using salt.
- Dehydrating Links — see all info on Dehydrating.
- Site Map — see the whole feast 🙂