Dehydrating Books Recommended by Stocking My Pantry

While I love learning about dehydrating online through videos and blog posts, time and time again I turn to books. Books have stood the test of time and are still one of the best ways to learn how to do something new.

Here are some of my favorite dehydrating books that I highly recommend.

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The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook

If you only pick up one book pertaining to dehydrating, I strongly recommend The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook (Amazon) by Tammy Gangloff.

The thing I love most about this book is that it provides information on how to dehydrate almost every type of fruit and vegetable. It lists them in alphabetical order, with fruit in one section and vegetables in another. This makes it easy to find the information you need without having to look in the table of contents or index.

For each item there is information on the best dehydrating temperature, and how to prepare the food for dehydrating. It also covers the approximate time you can expect it to take to dehydrate the fruit or vegetable, and how to test the item for dryness.

There is also a ton of information on the basics of dehydrating, so even if you’re new to dehydrating, you’ll know how to get started. It also includes some recipes using dehydrated food.

While I can’t say that you’ll never need to buy another dehydrating book, if you pick up this book and use it, you’ll have a solid foundation for dehydrating food.

Learn more about The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook on Amazon

Quick and Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag

Quick and Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag (Amazon) is another great book by Tammy Gangloff. What I love about this book is that it gives you a practical way to use all of the food you dehydrate.

The “in a bag” component of this makes it great for adding homemade prepared meals to your prepper pantry. When you think of all of the packaged foods you can add to your long-term food storage, many of them aren’t all that healthy. Creating your own “meals in a bag” is a great way to add convenience food to your prepper pantry with ingredients you can control. This book will help you figure out how to do that. As a bonus, many of these meals are also great for backpacking, camping, and other types of travel.

Pro tip: To prepare for creating your own meals in bags, I recommended picking up a vacuum sealer, vacuum sealer bags, mylar bags, and oxygen absorbers, all on Amazon.

Learn more about Quick and Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag on Amazon.

Pantry Stuffers Soup Mixes: Using Dehydrated Products

Next up on the list is Soup Mixes: Using Dehydrated Products (Amazon) by Wanda Bailey Clark.

This is another great book on how to use the food you dehydrate. As the name implies, this is all focused on soup. So, if you’re not a soup lover, this may not be the best book for you. Having said that, even if you don’t eat a ton of soup yourself, it’s great to have some in the pantry to make a quick meal, especially in the winter. Also, homemade soup mixes make great gifts – for Christmas, for new moms, or for a friend that is feeling under the weather.

One thing that makes this book unique – and very helpful – is that it has instructions for different serving sizes. This is great, because a single person or couple has very different needs compared to a large family. As an example of how this works, in the recipe for Mexican Corn Chowder (delicious!) you need, among other things, 1 cup of dehydrated corn for 6-8 servings, a half a cup for 3-4 servings, and 1/4 cup to 1-2 servings. Obviously, you can do the math yourself, but it’s much easier to follow the ingredient list based on the number of servings than having to adapt a recipe, ingredient by ingredient yourself.

Check out Soup Mixes: Using Dehydrated Products on Amazon.

Pantry Stuffers Rehydration Calculations Made Easy

Rehydration Calculations Made Easy (Amazon) is another great book by Wanda Bailey Clark.

What I love about this book is that it makes it easy to adapt your own recipes using dehydrated or freeze-dried food. For example, let’s say you’re cooking dinner, and the recipe calls for 1/2 cup of diced celery. Maybe you don’t have any fresh celery, but you do have some dehydrated or freeze-dried celery in your pantry. Great! But how much dehydrated or freeze-dried celery should you use in place of fresh? That’s where this book comes in handy! You don’t have to guess, because it tells you exactly how to make these substitutions.

This book also comes in handy if you want to make your own dehydrated meals in jars or bags, based on some of your favorite recipes. You can use this book to pick up where you left off with the Quick and Easy Dehydrated Meals in Bags book listed above. Using other people’s recipes is great, but creating your own convenience food with dehydrated or freeze-dried ingredients is even better, and this book makes that possible.

Check out Rehydration Calculations Made Easy on Amazon.