The Solar Food Dryer: How to Make and Use Your Own Low-Cost, High Performance, Sun-Powered Food Dehydrator
- ISBN13: 9780865715448
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The Solar Food Dryer describes how to use solar energy to dry your food instead of costly electricity. With your own solar-powered food dryer, you can quickly and efficiently dry all your extra garden veggies, fruits, and herbs to preserve their goodness all year long—with free sunshine! Applicable to a wide geography—wherever gardens grow—this well-illustrated book includes: • Complete step-by-step plans for building a high-performance, low-cost solar food dryer from readily available materials
• Solar energy design concepts
• Food drying tips and recipes
• Resources, references, solar charts, and more Eben Fodor is an organic gardener with a background in solar energy and engineering. He works as a community planning consultant in Eugene, Oregon…. More >>
If you do any kind of homemaking, preserving, growing of your own food, etc., then you absolutely need to get this book! This will give you low-cost and realistic way to preserve your food naturally and in a way that keeps it tasting great! The step-by-step instructions for building the author’s food dryer are top-notch and easy to follow, even for the non-mechanically inclined.
My only wish is that the author had included plans for the other food dryers mentioned, though a quick Google will supply this, so it’s not really necessary.
Fodor has written a book to be used, not simply read. The first part deals with the theory and physical facts of solar drying, while the second tells how to make a dryer. Next comes a section on preparing food to dry, followed by a brief group of recipes and, finally, some very handy appendices. Fodor writes clearly and handles details well.
This book is very informational about the food dryer design promoted in the book. I wish it had a little more information about the pros and cons of other solar dryer designs.
I don’t necessarily agree that the food dryer in this book is the most optimal design. Creating a hot plate, and then shading it with layers of fruit seems to be less then optimal to me. I am going to built a food dryer similar to the Mexican one described in the book. But that’s of course a personal choice. The book is very very detailed in how to make the proposed fruit dryer. If you are not a handy type person, I guess you will still be able to make it. For me, personally it’s far too much detail. I like to work from a picture only and make it to my liking, I don’t like all the strict guidelines. However, this book is very helpful in explaining all the in’s and out’s of food drying. The underlying principals, the effect of different angles in regards to the rays of the sun, the effect of where you are on the world in regards to the strenght’s of the sun rays, how to regulate the temperature by means of ventilation openings, etc. In this respect the book has taught me a lot more then I imagined I would, and has given me the basic knowledge to build a decent sun powered food dryer, and in that respect I regard this book as a really good buy.
The book explains the how and why of solar drying. I had been thinking about it as I dry quite a bit of produce/herbs each summer using an electrical dryer which is costly at this time. The solar dryers shown in the book would be for someone who dries small amounts at a time, but I have the concept and can build a unit(s) which could dry the amount of produce I process each year.