Onions!

Our first serious foray into dehydrating last year was onions. We had gathered all we could from our garden, but we certainly couldnt eat them all, and they didn't have enough top that we could braid them. Mom had given us some onion choppers, so I cleaned, and chopped, then dried them in the dehydrator. It took about 12 hours. Then we put them into seasoning jars and closed them up tightly. We really like to use dried chopped onions in alot of our food. What wonderful taste! But before long, we had used them all up.

This year on April 24th, I bought about 5 really BIG onions from JAMS, and later that day, we were gifted with two bags of onions for a total of about 13 pounds. Again, there were no tops to braid. I may not be one to mince words, but I needed to mince these onions quickly. I trotted out the food processor (no, we didn't get a book when we bought it) and tried every single blade until I discovered that the chopping blade that sits down inside the container would work the best.

I cleaned the onions, cut them into eighths, and piled them in until the container was full, then pulsed the blade until the pieces were the size that we like for in our food. I had to reapeat this about 10 times to get all the onion chopped.

I put the mesh screens in the trays and spread the onions on the screen about 1/4 inch deep. I filled 26 trays total. One of the great things about this dehydrator is that you do not need to rotate trays, so once you start, you can walk away until they are done.

We started the drying in the mid afternoon, so we used a lower temperature, about 110, and ran the dryer all night. In the morning, once the boys were off to school and VARC, I unloaded the trays. Then I got the food processor out again and broke the onions into large sections and put them in the container. I used the plastic blending blade and pulsed it to break the pieces apart. This worked really well and was quick. It took about two hours to finish this and pour the pieces into containers

The negatives of the project were:

• The house smelled of onions for two solid days (even after we were done)


• The dehydrator occupies a fair amount of counter space


• I cried A LOT

The benefits of the project were:

• Our total yield was about 20 ounces. I priced chopped onions at the local store, and 2 ounces of the store brand was $4.00. So our first PFB project this year saved us $40.00!


• We have plenty of chopped onion of the size we like, and don't have to be so conservative in using it

We plan to repeat this when our own onions are ready to harvest.