Not much room?!

I mentioned my bargain dehydrator last night. I've since checked the records and it cost just $19.97 - brand new with free postage!

Of course, I hadn't set out to buy a dehydrator but I thought it might be handy.  I'm sure it will be - now that I've retrieved it from the top shelf of the pantry and actually plugged it in!

I re-discovered a great website yesterday.  Chef Glenn is a back-packer who shares lots of information about dehydrating various foods.  He has recipes and packing tips also.

When we still lived on the Central Coast of NSW we used to regularly shop at a wholesale food supply store.  At times I bought dried mushrooms.  They were great to take camping and I sometimes used them at home. 

I was at Aldi today and they had 500g packs of button mushrooms for $0.99.  It was a sign, for sure!  I bought two packs and started my first drying experiment tonight.  Fortunately Erin and Vaughan were keen to slice mushrooms.  The two packs were processed and I filled all five trays of the dehydrator.  (There is a bowl of sliced mushrooms left over but I'll use them for tomorrow night's dinner). 

Chef Glen suggests a drying time of 6-8 hours.  My dehydrator instruction book states 4-10 hours.  At this stage, our mushrooms been drying for two hours and those on the bottom trays really seem to be shrinking.  They are changes to the slices on the upper trays also, so praps four hours will be long enough - for some if not all. I'll make notes for future reference.

The experiment is proving quite entertaining.  We are all checking progress and I expect there might be a shrinking vegetable theme for the weekend!

Edited to add:-
By the end of the drying time, I had around 60 grams of mushrooms.  They packed into two 500ml containers.

I'm not sure of starting weight.  I bought 1kg but used some in our beef stroganoff dinner - and forgot to weigh the remainder!