Dehydrating Beans Saves Space

A few days ago, I went to the local Amish farmer’s market to get some sweet corn. I noticed they still had quite a pile of green and yellow beans available. I usually don’t bother to can or freeze plain beans…I prefer them fresh or dehydrated. Dehydrated beans are great in the winter when I’m making vegetable soup. I can add just a handful of dried green beans…they rehydrate in the broth as the soup is cooking.

I thought I’d like to show you how much space (and weight) I save by dehydrating this batch of beans. I filled two sacks of green and yellow beans and brought them home. I snapped them and put them in the fridge while I got the dehydrator ready. The next day, I put each bag on the scales to see the weight I was starting with. The green beans weighed about 3 lbs. 4 oz. The yellow beans weighed about 2 1lb 12 oz…a total of about 6 lbs.

Next, I washed them, blanched them for 4 minutes in boiling water, cooled them in ice water, put them in a bag in the fridge while I did the next batch.

The manual says I should put them in the freezer for 30 minutes, but the fridge worked for me. They dehydrate quicker when they start out cold apparently.

The beans filled all 9 trays of my dehydrator.

The dehydrator sits outside the kitchen door in the garage. It makes noise, has to run for 10-12 hours and is too big to put in the kitchen.

To determine how long to dehydrate the beans, I checked the manual for my dehydrator.

This map shows the general percent of humidity in each region, by season. Pennsylvania is in the green zone in July. The day I dehydrated the beans was damp and rainy so I assumed the time of 11 hours might be more like 12 hours.

The manual describes how to test when the food is dry enough. Vegetables should be brittle.

During the 11 hours, I rotated the trays front to back and from upper levels to the middle several times. The fan is located in the back, so the back of the trays get dry faster than the front edge. After 11 hours, the beans look like this:

Once I determined they were dry enough…because they were brittle when I bent them…I put them in a zip bag and weighed them again. The 6 lbs. of beans now weighed about 9 1/2 oz…a little more than 1/2 lb.

I store dehydrated vegetables in my canning jars, with little packets of oxygen absorbers. They keep the jar sealed on the shelf.

The oxygen absorbers can be purchased at Amazon in several sizes…these are 300cc. I put several in each jar with the beans.

So that 6 lbs. of green and yellow beans are ready for my winter soup. I’ll put about 1/2 cup of dehydrated beans in a pot of soup to start and will add more if needed…depends on the amount of soup I’m making! They need about 30 minutes to reconstitute. Enjoy!