Dehydrating Onions

It was not a pleasant experience, standing for nearly an hour in the kitchen with tears streaming down my face – onions make me cry!

Hubby and I purchased a dehydrator not that long before he died.  We dried corn and celery, but since then it has sat in storage and lately in a cupboard.

When I found onions on special at the supermarket I decided it was time to try out the dehydrator again.

The onions were peeled and sliced into 5mm thin rings and laid out on the trays.  I didn’t need to pre-treat them in any way, which was a bonus.

I set the machine at 50 degrees Celsius, the recommended temperature for vegetables, and dried them for ten hours (turning them over after four hours). 

The house absolutely reeked of onions when I first started, but the smell lessened as they dried – or perhaps we just got used to it!

They then sat overnight before I dried them a further three hours, by which time they had become crisp and brittle enough to crumble in my fingers.

Once the onion rings were cold I bagged them up and used a heat-sealing gadget to remove all the air.

It was a bit tricky deciding on when to bag them.  I wanted them completely cold so that they wouldn’t sweat in the bag, but I also didn’t want them sitting in the open and possibly absorbing moisture from the surrounding atmosphere.  Hopefully I got the timing right.

This bag contains about 500g (one pound) of fresh onions, dehydrated and ready to use.

 I tried eating one of the rings.  It still had the pungency of onion (although not as strong) and was amazingly sweet.

It might make a good snack to chase away colds!

Margaret J