Review: The Ultimate Healthy Dehydrator Cookbook: 150 Recipes to Make and Cook with Dehydrated Foods by Pamela Ellgen

In light of Amazon's new terms of service (TOS), I am blogging about some of my recent purchases.  In full disclosure, I received this product for free for my honest opinion.  My opinion is true and honest and I am not being compensated to give a positive review.  I used the book and love it!
 5 out of 5 stars
I bought The Ultimate Healthy Dehydrator Cookbook: 150 Recipes to Make and Cook with Dehydrated Foods by Pamela Ellgen from amazon.com.  I love banana chips and my dogs love sweet potato chews and I wanted to explore dehydrating food at home instead of paying the crazy prices at the store.  I "borrowed" my parents dehydrator and got this book to give me a jump start.


This book is laid out really well.  It starts with a "Quick Start Guide" that tells you the down and dirty places to go in the book if you are impatient and don't want to read the whole book first.  I admit, I did this.   :)

The book is divided into "Dehydration Education", "Simple Dehydrated Food", "Dehydrated Food Recipes" and "Recipes with Dehydrated Foods".  This is a logical organization.  As a teacher, I like to know the background as to why to do something and the book has a wonderful list of what you need to get started.  Basically, you need an oven.  Each recipe includes the times for oven dehydrating or using a dehydrator.  With this book, you don't have to invest the money in a special machine.  You can try out the recipes with what you already have available to you. 


The pictures are beautiful and add to the layout.  Whoever styled their pictures is amazing!



My favorite recipe by far is the banana chips.  Many recipes include also dehydrating in the sun.  The recipes are all easy to follow.  The banana chips come out sweet and chewy.  I find myself wanting to eat these chips with everything.  They are amazing alone, but also yummy in yogurt.  My dogs even like them as treats.



The last section of the book focuses on recipes using dehydrated foods.  I found this helpful because I like to try new recipes and I didn't want to get stuck in just eating granola or handfuls of dried fruit.  I didn't realize how versatile dehydrated food could be.


The "index" part of the books has some very useful information.  My favorite is "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Clean Fifteen".  These are the two lists of foods that should always bought organic and that are okay to buy non-organic. 

Overall, I give this book 5 stars for someone just getting into dehydrating foods.

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