The NESCO food dehydrator company has made Nesco food dehydrators for over thirty years and their patented food dehydrators feature technology that dries your food faster and evenly.
Click the RED WORDS to see the dehydrators on Amazon.com
This is a square-shaped food dehydrator, perfect for snacks, fruit, and beef jerky. White with a top black tray edge, with a white lid.
This round Nesco Snackmaster comes with a jerky gun kit and 5 trays. It has a very light grey body with a darker grey lid.
This is the new version of mine as it has an updated lid. It's a light grey body with a darker grey lid.
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According to NESCO®, you get even-drying from top to bottom because of NESCO's Converge-A-Flow® air-flow design.
This is supposed to eliminate the tray rotation, but I still rotate the trays, anyway.
They also have clear NESCO® food
dehydrator trays so you can see what's drying.
They also have a Snackmaster® Square Dehydrator and Jerky Maker as mentioned in the RED WORDS/links near the top of the page.
Check out this FD-75A model over on Amazon.
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The NESCO® food dehydrator models have a temperature selector on the lid and are easy to read and use.
The NESCO® food dehydrator fan is located on the top inside the lid, (which is better than some models where the fan is at the bottom, as it makes it a breeze to keep clean!)
There isn't an on/off switch on the NESCO® food dehydrator, you just have to
plug the dehydrator in and unplug it when you're done. More on that below.
Click RED WORDS below to see it on Amazon.com
You can buy a
'timer-switch' from hardware stores if you want to have the luxury of
the NESCO® food dehydrator turning off, say after ten hours, if you know you
won't be home to shut it off!
A neat feature of a NESCO® food dehydrator is that you can stack as many trays as you want, within reason!
(You MUST have a minimum of four trays in use; see additional comments coming up).
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I feel good about being able to use as many dehydrator trays as needed, rather than having to run the machine with empty trays. Sometimes I'll have just four trays going, and some days seven!
I began with the NESCO® four-tray model and purchased additional
trays.
They come in sets of two at a very reasonable price.
I was pleased that the new NESCO food dehydrator trays color-matched perfectly with the old(er) trays for an almost seamless stacking experience!
I also made sure I had solid fruit roll sheets too, more on these coming up!
NOTE: NESCO® states you must use a minimum of four trays, whether you've got food on all four trays or not, for the fan to create even drying.
The only time I ever need to run the dehydrator with less than four trays is when I make fruit roll-ups—I only have two Fruit Roll Sheets that came with the dehydrator so only two trays are actually being used! So I bought two more sheets, but I'm leaving in the following paragraph for those of you who still are operating your NESCO food dehydrators with two roll-up sheets.
Keep on scrolling to read more about screens to keep your Nesco food dehydrator clean!
So for now, when only using TWO trays for the roll-ups until you have purchased more fruit roll sheets to make the stack of trays add up to four, add an empty tray (without clean-a-Screens, more on those coming up) in-between the fruit roll trays and one more on top, so that you have the 'four tray minimum' for drying.
NESCO® food dehydrators also have "Clean-a-Screens" which are circular plastic mesh flexible screens. They have little half-round cutouts for your fingers to enable easy removal of the sheets—and that's great!
They fit neatly into the dehydrator trays and this enables you to keep small foods from falling through to the trays below (as foods shrink when they dry out!)
Click the RED WORDS to see the accessories on Amazon.com
Nesco LSS-2-6 Round clear plastic 13-1/2" diameter Fruit Roll Sheets, white.
Nesco LM-2-6 Round plastic mesh 13-1/2" diameter Clean-A-Screens, white.
Nesco WT-2SG Round Speckled Plastic 13-1/2" diameter Add-A-Tray.
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Also, any sticky fruits/foods clean off really easily from these dehydrator screens—which is their intended purpose. I just soak mine in the sink, then gently scrub away any stubborn particles, but honestly, it's rare that I have to put that much elbow grease into cleaning them.
My 4-tray model came complete with two Fruit Roll Sheets as mentioned above, and these are like the Clean-a-Screens because they fit neatly into the trays, but these are solid so that the tray's contents CAN'T spill or seep through! Important when pouring puréed fruits to make the fruit roll-ups!
The NESCO® dehydrator company also offers cookbooks and Jerky Gun Kits.
NOTE: Some of you have written in saying that you've been using plastic wrap instead of the NESCO® Fruit Roll sheets—word of caution here! Make SURE you DO NOT cover the center hole in the trays—if you do, you won't get ANY air circulation and you'll likely burn the motor/thermostat out if you forget.
I'd err on the safe
side and get more Fruit Roll Sheets because of their affordability.
Susan Gast began Easy Food Dehydrating in December 2010.
Read Susan's story of what sparked her interest in all things related to "food dehydrating."
She is featured on the Mother Earth News blog, and on Solo Build It! (SBI!) who hosts this site. Read her first SBI! interview and her second SBI! interview.
Since 1980, Susan's involvement in publishing - in one form or another - led her to create ePubTechReviews which reviews a variety of products related to the publishing industry - if you're at all interested in AI and self-publishing. The website is also hosted by Solo Build It!
Susan also runs her namesake site SusanGast.com on Solo Build It! that showcases the books she has written since 2012.
Do you want to send Susan a quick message? Visit her contact page here. She'd love to hear from you!
If you want to check out dehydrator reviews before getting one, then please visit Dehydratorjudge.com for in-depth "Best Food Dehydrator" reviews.
Also read a more about the history of dehydrating food on their website here.