There are several things that set me out to look for a dehydrator for our home, and having the Excalibur dehydrator has benefited our family is several ways. My daughter, like many kids, is finicky when it comes to eating fruits and vegetables,. Making fruit leathers in our Excalibur is easy, and allows me to preserve all types of fruit when it comes in season and can be purchased in bulk for low costs, and my daughter eats them up with gusto.
My husband and I were looking for a way to trim down our budget, and the idea of being able to purchase fresh produce in bulk when it was in season and on sale, and preserve it for future cooking was one of the things we hoped to do. The options were canning, freezing, or drying produce. Canning consumes a good amount of time and pantry space, as well as cooks a lot of the nutrients out of the foods, and can make them unpalatable when the time comes to use them in a dish. Freezing also takes a good deal of space and preparation, and you run the risk of losing your food to freezer burn. Dehydrating food usually takes the same type of preparation as freezing, since you have to blanch many foods before you can dry them, but the finished product is fantastic. Beans, carrots, tomatoes, onions, peppers… there are all kinds of vegetables that can be dried. They’re fantastic for use in pasta, soups, sauces, and other cooked dishes.
I found that the Excalibur 3900 dehydrator came highly recommended, and after a bit of research, we purchased this model. The dehydrator is a large black box with a front cover that slips on and off easily. On the top is a temperature dial that allows you to control how hot you would like the air to be, which helps to prevent case hardening: when a fruit or vegetable dries on the outside, but moisture is still trapped inside, causing it to go rancid. The Excalibur works very differently from many other dehydrators, because the fan and heating element aren’t on top or bottom, but rather in the back of the machine. When the heating element and fan are on the top or bottom of a stacked dehydrator, air has to push through every level, and items further from the fan dry much slower, requiring the trays to be shuffled. The Excalibur is much more efficient and faster, since the air moves from the back to the front across all nine trays. Drying is quick and even, and takes less attention while the machine is at work.
Each of the nine trays slide easily in to place inside the dehydrator, and are very easy to wash. I’ve even used the trays as a sieve to drain delicate blanched berries, such as blueberries, that may burst if over handled. This layout has several benefits. If food falls, or drips through their trays, it falls on the bottom of the dehydrator, and not into the engine as it would in bottom heating dehydrators. Also, since the trays don’t stack, but slide into their own tracks you can remove some of the trays allowing for larger items to be placed into the machine.
The only complaint I have about this dehydrator is that it can be very loud. The motor in the Excalibur can make a lot of noise, and the trays or lid may vibrate. With this in mind, choose a place for your dehydrator that will help to muffle the sound, or operate it at times that you won’t be bothered by the sound. For our house, the little bit of noise is well worth the benefits that the Excalibur brings.
We purchased the factory refurbished model offered on the Excalibur website. This is a great deal, since the machine has not been previously owned, but is instead a store model that comes to you refurbished from the manufacturer, with the same 10 year warranty that comes with all of their dehydrators, all for about $170 or $100 less than it would have been if I had purchased the same model new. They offer several different sizes of dehydrator, and some with functions like timers that will turn the dehydrator off once the timer runs out. Their different options allow you to choose the dehydrator that fits your needs and kitchen space.
