Dehydrated Spaghetti Sauce

I’ve been preparing for summer vacation lately and trying to get our food situation set up. I recently tested out dehydrated ground beef and it was a success. If you would like to read that post click here. I use a dehydrator but you can also use your oven if you don’t have a dehydrator.

I was really overwhelmed when picking out a dehydrator. There are SO many options. I chose the Nesco FD-77DT Digital Top Mounted Dehydrator which you can view by clicking here. It came with plenty of trays and both regular and jelly roll liners, which are good for sauces and purees. What attracted me to this model is the fact that it has a timer. This comes in handy while I’m at work or sleeping. I have used the dehydrator at least a dozen times since Christmas and I’ve been very happy so far. Back to the sauce!

I make homemade spaghetti sauce and the recipe makes enough for two meals for our family. I made spaghetti the other night and decided to try dehydrating the leftover sauce. To dehydrate the sauce, I placed the jelly roll liners on my dehydrator trays and covered them in sauce. Using these liners is important because the sauce would otherwise leak through the trays and create a nasty mess.

I set the temperature to 135 degrees and let the dehydrator get to work. After 6.5 hours the trays were mostly dehydrated but there were some wet spots. When dehydrating sauces/fruit purees, it’s important to get an even layer to prevent wet spots. I circled them in the picture below.

I could have continued to dehydrate the sauce to get rid of the wet spots but since most of it dehydrated I called it a day, rolled it up, put it in a freezer bag, and threw it in the freezer for storage.

**Since I started this post I dehydrated more sauce. This time, I made thinner layers on the jelly roll sheets with no thick spots. It took about six hours and worked beautifully. The trick with sauces and purees seems to be thin, even layers.

When we were ready to rehydrate the sauce I put the dehydrated sauce and too much water in a bowl.

Fortunately, I hadn’t added all the sauce to the bowl so I was able to add more to soak up all that water. Next time I will start with a small amount of water just to get the sauce wet to start turning into mush. Alternatively, I could have added some water to the bag and let it rehydrate that way. (This is what I’ll do when we are camping.) The sauce took much longer to rehydrate than the ground beef – close to an hour all together. It was a weird consistency and I kept having to add more water.

Keep adding water, little bits at a time, until the sauce is to the consistency you like. Once rehydrated, heat it up and voila!

Dinner is served. 🍝