Solar food drying is fun, easy and free. With renewable sunshine, you can dry as much as you like, as often as you like. Solar food drying is a far more practical way to dry your garden produce than most people would think.
A good, high-performance, solar dryer is designed to harness the sun efficiently and will work amazingly well in almost any part of North America, and at most times of the year.
Using the sun to dry food may be the oldest form of food preservation, dating back thousands of years. For many prehistoric people, dried fruits, berries, grains, fish and meat were essential to surviving the cold winters. Hanging or laying food out in the open air and sunshine was the simplest method available for drying and preserving the food collected over the summer. But open-air sun drying has many limitations.
Solar drying is a big step forward over sun drying. "Solar dryer" is used to refer to a durable, enclosed, weatherproof design that takes advantage of solar energy design principles to efficiently dry food. "Sun drying" refers to simply placing food out in the open sunshine to dry.
You can learn all the latest about this exciting solar application from the new book, The Solar Food Dryer: How to make and use your own high-performance, sun-powered food dehydrator, by Eben Fodor (2006) from New Society Publishers.
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©2009 by Eben Fodor