Product Review: Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator
You’ve probably seen the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator on one of those television infomercials. They make the idea of food dehydration sound exciting. They say you can make beef or turkey jerky, trail mix, banana chips, and dried spices and soup ingredients. They say you can make fruit roll-ups and dried flowers for decorations and potpourri and even dehydrated pet treats. It all sounds amazing and even easy.
The folks who advertise The Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator go on to exclaim the benefits of controlling the healthfulness of the ingredients you use for cooking, by creating your dehydrated foods exactly how you like it. The Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator has dishwasher safe trays, and a number of trays, which make the appliance expandable and give you the flexibility to dehydrate different items at the same time. You can preserve garden vegetables to use all year long, create trail mixes for kids snacks and camping, and it even comes with a book of recipe ideas. Additionally, it is supposed to be a very quiet machine because there is no motorized fan, but rather it works on the principle of heating coils. It was lightweight and supposedly easy to clean. And the price was under $60, so it sounded like a good deal.
I could imagine myself dehydrating all kinds of produce and putting it in food storage containers and Ziploc bags to save throughout the year to use in dips, sauces, soups, stir-fry. I also loved the idea of making my own banana chips. I had no desire to use it for crafts or making any kind of jerky. I figured my expectations were simple, so how could I go wrong? I called an ordered one.
When the unit arrived, it was poorly packaged, however it all seemed in tact and nothing was broken. The trays were cheaper looking than they appeared on TV and they seemed like a highly breakable plastic.
I read the instructions and the first thing I wanted to make was banana chips and dehydrated apples. I set everything up and got started. After laying the fresh thinly cut fruits to be dehydrated, I realized the trays really didn’t hold that much because you had to allow space for proper airflow. I also had to periodically rotate and change the trays so they would all get enough heat. I didn’t trust leaving my house with this Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator being plugged in and on. I was concerned about safety. I also started to realize how long and slow it took to dehydrate the fruits, and if I had not periodically rotated the trays, then the top trays were getting dryer slower. It was so slow in fact, I started wondering if the food would perish before it even got dehydrated. After several hours I finally had enough of waiting and unplugged the unit to proceed removing my dehydrated goodies. The Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator never fully dehydrated my banana chips and they were sticky and some stuck to the plastic trays. They tasted great and I chalked it up to my impatience and I would give it another try in a couple of days after re reading the instruction booklet again. So, I set aside a whole other day to dehydrate some mushrooms and other vegetables with my new Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator. Unfortunately, it never got easier, and the procedure still seemed like it took forever. My idea of making many batches of items and trail mix for my friends and family, quickly became a silly idea, because it would be less effort and probably cost me less to just buy what I wanted than to dehydrate it myself. I felt like I was wasting a lot of electricity with very little yield of product in return. After cleaning up my unit I began looking in some kitchen product catalogs of food dehydrators. I discovered that all the other food dehydrators had motorized fans, which meant food could be dehydrated more quickly. I realized that the “feature” of no fan on the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator which was presented as a benefit for quietness, was really a weakness of the product, not a strength. I packed the product up and gave it to someone who really wanted to try making jerky with it. I don’t know if they ever used it, because I never asked.
I still like the idea of food dehydration and giving up my Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator does not mean I gave up on the the quest to dehydrate foods. Stay tuned for a future product review of a food dehydrator that met my expectations.
