Sunday, March 2, 2014

Dehydrating Spinach



So I just recently found out you can dehydrate spinach!! 

Why have I not know about this!?! I swear I waste more spinach than I use. I always buy the Costco size organic baby spinach. It comes in a thin plastic tub with lid. I use some about every other day, but in the end, feed about half the container to the rabbits. (So it's not really a waste, either) 

Anyways, recently a friend asked me why I didn't just dehydrate it and explained this is how she makes her green juice powder at home. She takes all her unused greens and dries them out and powders them and makes her morning green smoothie with the powder.

I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped. This thought had never crossed my mind. 

I immediately pulled out my dehydrator and put half the container of spinach in it to test this out. 


Half the container filled all four of my trays.

I set the heat at about 125*. After about 7 hours I started to checked every 2 to 3 hours, in total it took close to 8 hours to fully dehydrate. 


Once don't I shuffled all of the dried spinach into the food processor.


And processed! 


The end result was slightly grainy, but very powdery, and smelled somewhat awful, but close to the smell of canned spinach. (Which I despise) 


The half container of spinach dried down to about 5 oz of powder.


I used it the very next day in my favorite green chile stew recipe, something I normally would not put spinach in. It was fantastic! You could not taste it at all, but it was visible and gave a nice seasoned look to the stew. 


I also used it in my sons smoothie, which I normally put fresh spinach in, however, I was able to put about 5 times more of the dehydrated version in one smoothie than fresh without any change in flavor. 


Hells. Yes.


This was such a fantastic success. I'm sure ill be doing this about every two or three weeks. 




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