Breadbeckers Classes - Woodstock - Canning, Dehydrating Foods

[Chris Mac]

Not sure if anyone is interested in learning about dehydrating food, canning, etc. The shop is located in Woodstock and they offer classes every other weekend. This weekend it's canning and dehydrating your own food. Gonna go with my wife and spend a little quality time and then bring the details home to teach our children as part of their home schooling curriculum. The cost is $6 per person (you may want to call and verify that as I'm going on details passed along to me).

http://info.breadbeckers.com/events

They'll probably try to sell you supplies, but I've heard they're pretty good. If not you can get the same stuff elsewhere for less.

Drop me a line and let me know if you're going so I know to introduce myself.

 

[Chris Mac]

We went to this class as planned and learned a ton about dehydrating food. I was very impressed with the nutritional benefits of dehydrating and the long term storage opportunities. A couple of key points:

1. Canning removes 60-70% of the nutritional benefit of the foods you are processing (depends on heat and food type), but it offers "ready made" food that simply needs to be opened and eaten.
2. Dehydrating retains up to 90% of the nutrition - but offers the possiblitiy of much more compact long term storage. Needs to be reconsitited using water but it's very, very quick. Loses none of it's taste.

For instance, dehydrating fresh tomatoes and then powdering them via a blender allowed placement of up to 100 tomotoes in a glass canning jar. Entire soup mix ingredients can be dehydrated and placed in prepackaged containers for easy use later on - and can be stored for very long periods of time. The right dehydrators can make great beek or venison jerky.

Visit the wbesite linked above for class details. We bought a dehydrator from the models thay had in stock - priced pretty competitively.

Breadbeckers is also a good source of grain and supplies in buckets for long term storage.

 

[willr1]

thanks for sharing, that's something im interested in learning

 

[tlw1179]

I don't know if any of you have /tried canned deer meat! kill the deer take to processor and ask him to cut/cube it for canning! There is a place just over th GA/SC line where you can take the meat and have it canned! My wife's grandfather used to do this and i thought it was crazy but after i tried some it was as tender as roast and had no deer taste, shelf life was 3-4 years