Drying Green Beans
I have in the last four years gotten into drying foods for storage. When I dry my garden surplus I can store more than I can with canning the items or freezing them. Plus once the item is dried it is smaller and can be stored easily.
I bought my first dehydrator at a church rummage sale for $5. It was a really good one but I soon found it was hard to clean and some of the food items would stick. Tomatoes were a bear to get off. So I researched and found a new one I wanted to purchase.
Then I set to saving up for it. It took me about 18 months and then I purchased it. Since then I have just fell in love with my dehydrator. (Well as much as anyone can really love an appliance.) 😉
I use my dehydrator to dry lots of fruits and vegetable to use in the winter.
My most recent drying session was to dry the extra green beans from our garden. I sometimes will use my pressure canner to can these but the drying process is easier.
My freezer just doesn’t have that much extra room right now so I chose to dry this batch.
How to Dehydrate Green Beans
Step 1. Prepare the Green Beans
Remove both ends of the beans then cut them into about 1 inch lengths.
Step 2. Blanch the Green Beans
Blanched the prepared beans for two to three minutes in boiling water. Then place them on the dehydrator tray and run cool water over them to stop the cooking process.
Step 3. Dry the Green Beans
Turn your dehydrator to 125 degrees and dry for 6-9 hours.
These green beans below took about 9 hours to dry at 125 degrees. Here’s what they looked like once they were dry.
How to Store Dried Green Beans
To keep the moisture away, store the dried green beans in a vacuum sealed bag for future use.
Ways to Used Dried Beans in Recipes
The home dried beans work really well in soups as they plump up really well as they are cooking. Just throw them in at the beginning of cooking time.
These dried green beans also work well in crock pot recipes. So if you have a crock pot soup or casserole recipe that calls for green beans these will work well in those too.
Do you do any food preservation at your home?
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This is such a great idea! The closest I’ve come to preserving food at my house is making refrigerator pickles… ha ha. I would love to learn how to can foods, but then I would have to start a garden to have something to can 🙂
I also can peaches and pears I get from the farm stands. The home canned items are so much better. I grew up on them with my mom canning a lot of our food even though we did not have a big garden. We would do a lot of u-pick to get the produce to can when I was young.