Don’t try this at home!
I love the crunchy dried green beans you can find in tiny plastic boxes at our natural food store. At nearly $5.00 a pop though, it’s an occasional splurge we like to take on long road trips to balance out the unhealthy snacks found at most roadstops. With this in mind, I was delighted to find several recipes for dehydrated green beans online at the very time I had about a gallon of organic green beans from my garden just waiting to be used,(how fortunate was that?), and so decided to try dehydrating them myself.
Let me just say that not every recipe you see online is a good one, not every glowing review is to be trusted, and not every kitchen adventure is a success. Some recipes should NEVER be shared. If it’s a failure, even the best cook should just admit it and move on. In the spirit of full disclosure then, and because it made me laugh, I have to tell you about this experience… because it was a total DISASTER!
Full of anticipation, I washed and lightly blanched the green beans in boiling water, just as the instructions recommended. Then drained them and blotted them dry with paper towels. I had read that slicing the beans French-style( long ways) helped them dry more evenly, so I did that, too. Seasoning in the online recipes varied, so I just used my favorite: a little lemon juice olive oil and sea salt. It all seemed so simple; what could go wrong? When I put the seasoned green beans in the dehydrator they looked like this… beautiful, right?
I set the dehydrator to 105 degrees in order to maintain the living enzymes in the vegetables and went to bed. Eight hours later, when I checked their progress I saw this:
The bright green beans had turned into brownish leathery strips — not crunchy at all! Hmmm, what to do to salvage these beans? I decided to leave them in the dehydrator for a longer time to see if that would help. Still at 105 degrees, I waited another six hours and checked again. They couldn’t get any worse, could they? Yes!
After a total 14 hours in the dehydrator my final product looked like dried brown shoelaces and tasted about the same. One gallon of fresh beans had turned into two loosely filled pint jars. (To be honest a few of those beans did get crispy, but it would take quite a bit of chewing to gnaw through the rest). I think I will save these beans as a reminder that not every recipe you see online is a good one, not every glowing review is to be trusted, and not every kitchen adventure is a success. I share this only for the humor. I hope you laugh as I did, and please, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.
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