The Hiker Beans: Bag it!

When we started dehydrating food we looked into vacuum sealers and all that they encompassed. Then I read several dehydrated food books and several people suggested double bagging with disposable zipper style bags. Alright, sounds good, cheap, reusable. But I need quite a number of baggies to hold all the food that we're dehydrating. Dave picked up a small box of Ziploc brand bags when we got the dehydrator up and running and we're quickly going through them.

I considered purchasing more at Meijer the other day when I was there. I looked at store brand versus name brand. Ziploc brand were running $7.59 for just over 100 sandwich bags. I was just going to get the cheaper store brand... but then I remember seeing huge boxes of Ziploc brand at Menards and I thought I remembered the prices being a fair bit better than even store brand.

I skipped buying bags last week and then I ended up procrastinating a little more. Finally I bought boxes of Ziploc bags yesterday at Menards. For once procrastination paid off! The jumbo boxes of bags were on sale... $8.00 for 460 sandwich bags. Wow! Big difference in price there. Same exact bags, just in bulk and one of those oddities that Menards carries.

One thing I did pick up at Meijer last week was cans of pie filling. They're full of fruit and sugar and we like to experiment with the dehydrator. Below are trays of the pureed pie filling: apple, cherry, strawberry. They have been drying for 12 hours and I will leave them overnight because it is too late for me to do anything with them now and they are still a bit tacky.

Update on the pie filling dehydration:

The pie fillings didn't exactly dry. They had far too much gelatin in the mix and they stayed insanely tacking. So much so they stuck to the trays and my hands as I pulled them off and to everything else in my kitchen. I'm posting some graphic pictures below... they look a little scary!