Dehydrating Recipes

You don't need will-power. YOU NEED TO EAT RIGHT. Dehydrated food is tasty fun food that will fill you, satisfy you, heal you. Dehydrated living and raw foods are perfectly balanced by Nature. They BALANCE you.

A dehydrator makes warm raw meals without killing a single enzyme. Cooking destroys all enzymes. Dr. Howell in his book Enzyme Nutrition proved that the more enzymes you eat, the longer and more vibrantly you live.

The Vita-Mix Blender goes perfectly with your dehydrator. I was using Cuisinart but as soon as I could afford it, I bought a Vita-Mix because it works better than a food processor for blending the batter.

L'Equip and Cuisinart

All my cracker recipes are for one full 7-cup Cuisinart Classic food processor and a L'Equip Dehydrator with six solid sheets. So the batter fills the Cuisinart bowl, then fills the six L'Equip sheets. They make two full one-quart (1-liter) jars of crackers, each cracker about 3" x 3" in size (7x7cm).

Sproutman’s Kitchen Garden Cookbook points out that “the small model Cuisinart excels [for grinding sprouted wheat] because it has a high blade-to-bowl impact ratio.” He advises that when buying a food processor, you look at the models with small bowls and high RPM’s – “this creates tremendous force that finely decimates the grains.”

Of course, the bowl should not be too small! It must fit at least seven cups of ingredients with room to spare.

Quick Crunch + Pie Crust

Buy whole organic wheat berries at a health food store. The soft golden spring wheat is best. The hard brown winter wheat is for growing into grass for wheatgrass juice.

Sprinkle wheat seeds into your Sprouter trays – get Sprouter at discount with Dehydrator here. Leave for 2-3 days until the short thick shoot is slightly green (the one growing into grass). 

Sprouter automatically sprays seeds with high-oxygen mist every three hours, so you get no mold. Then sprinkle your wheat sprouts onto Dehydrator mesh trays and dry at 100°F (38°C) for 24 hours. 

Store in a glass jar, with a cotton ball to absorb moisture. Grind the dried sprouts in a $12 coffee grinder as you need them – sprinkle on your and your pet’s food for a delicious nutrient-rich supplement.

Mix with apple juice for an instant raw pie crust, then fill pie with blended fruit.

Give your family the food you need to be FREE of dentists and doctors! Raw, living foods.

Superoxide Dismutase – SOD

Leave the wheat sprouts in your Sprouter until they're 2 inches high (5cm) growing into grass, then dehydrate and grind. Now you have a powerful SOD supplement to sprinkle on food. The greener the plant, the more SOD.

SOD is a protein, and our fifth most abundant enzyme, it's in every body cell. Together with catalase (finely balanced with SOD in fresh young grass) it turns harmful free radicals into stable oxygen and water. It's your reverse-aging enzyme. Wherever you're at risk for free radical damage – wrinkles, arthritis – you need SOD.

Ed McCabe in his book O2xygen Therapies describes high-dosage SOD tablets made from wheat sprouts: "Each tablet is equal to a square foot of wheat sprouts, 2 inches high, or 8 bottles of regular SOD found in stores."

Why buy DEAD tablets, when it's so cheap to grow LIVING sprouts? The world's most-productive one-minute job is to sprinkle seeds in an Automatic Sprouter. Your Sprouter does the work, and you reap the food when it's ripe for your needs – sprouts for drying, or grass for juicing.

Hydroponic wheat sprouts are rich in sugars, the good kind your cells need for energy, and in vitamins, minerals, proteins (pre-digested into amino acids) and Nature's magical nutrients unknown to science.

Hydroponic means it's grown without soil, quickly, easily, in a Sprouter in your kitchen or basement.

The Quick Crunch recipe above is an easy way to give carbohydrate to your animal companions. For humans, fresh fruit is the best source of carbohydrates, but for animals dried wheat sprouts are easiest (ground to a powder). Sprinkle it on their food – and of course on yours!

I keep a small dark-glass bottle of ready-ground, dried wheat sprouts in my refrigerator to sprinkle on the meals of my cat Tommy and dog Gracie, and a large jar of dehydrated whole wheat sprouts (ready for grinding) in the cupboard.

For cats, sprouted grains are the closest thing to the pre-digested grains they'd eat from the stomach of a bird or mouse.

Good Dehydrating Recipe Books

I highly recommend:

• Living on Live Food by Alissa Cohen (Cohen Publishing, 2004)
• Sproutman's Kitchen Garden Cookbook by Steve Meyerowitz (Sproutman Publications, 1999)
• Vibrant Living by James Levin and Natalie Cederquist (now back in print)

Sprouting the Wheat for Crackers

Until you have an Automatic Sprouter, you can sprout the wheat berries in jars. But jars don't work for the grass SOD recipe above.

Buy wide-mouthed one-liter preserving jars and nylon mesh (from hardware store) or mosquito netting. Push out the center disk in the jar lid, cut out a circle of mesh big enough to drape over the mouth of the jar and hang half-inch down its sides. Screw the outer rim of the lid over the mesh to hold it in place, this lets air in, keeps bugs out.

Buy golden spring wheat berries. Use one cup wheat berries per one quart jar (one-liter). Measure off the wheat and remove any stones and broken bits – I sift through them quickly on a white plate. Pour the berries into the jars, cover with an inch of filtered water. Soak for 8 hours or overnight. Pour off water, drain upside-down at 45° angle, rinse and drain twice a day for two days until there's a tender shoot.

You'll see white hair-like rootlets and one thick shoot that will grow into the grass blade. This shoot should match the length of the berry, not be shorter because then it'll be short on nutrition and difficult to grind. And not longer for crackers and bread (not going green).

If you're not ready to use your wheat sprouts when they're ready, store them in an airtight container in refrigerator to stop the sprouting process – place the center disk back into the lid to make it airtight.

Grinding the Wheat

For bread, I grind my wheat sprouts in my Samson juicer with mincing screen. It grinds each kernel perfectly to make a soft smooth dough.

For crackers, I grind first in my Samson, then I mix with other ingredients in a food processor. I never mix bread in the food processor, rather I knead the other ingredients in. A food processor makes the bread too soggy.

Rinse your sprouts about 3-4 hours before grinding. Sprouts that are too dry or too wet will not grind properly. Also this rinses off any mold (naked to our eye).

For grinding your cracker blends, use a food processor with the stainless steel or S-blade. Or best of all, use the Vita-Mix Blender. An ordinary blender won’t work because it needs excessive water. Only Vita-Mix blends without water.

I use my judgment as to how much liquid to add when making each batch of cracker blend. It comes with experience. You want a fairly smooth paste-like consistency that’ll slide onto the solid sheets, not too watery and not too chunky, something you can pat down and even out with a knife.

“Every grain should be fractionated into paste,” writes Sproutman, “unfractionated wheat berries will give the unpleasant taste of little rocks in the finished bread [or cracker].”

I loved to munch on these when I worked in a New York office, after my lunch of baby greens, bean sprouts and vegetable fruits (any of tomato, cucumber, zucchini, squash, red or yellow pepper).

See also What to Dehydrate for other good munchies such as Nachos chips. 

I’ve adapted the Carrot Cake Raisin Bars recipe in Vibrant Living by Levin & Cederquist. In their recipe, they make spicy nutty bars by dehydrating until moist and chewy, and store in refrigerator. I dehydrate into a cracker and store in cupboard.

T = Tablespoon, t = teaspoon, C = cup.

3 C carrots, finely grated (about 4 medium carrots)
4 C sprouted wheat berries (1C wheat berries will grow into 2C wheat sprouts in 2 days)
1/2 C soaked almonds, finely ground (optional)
1/2 C walnuts, ground (optional)
20 small pitted dates (raw unpitted)
1/3 C raisins
1 t pumpkin pie spice - 1/4 t each of ground cloves, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon
1 t vanilla essence

Pit dates and soak them with raisins for an hour, pour off soak water, grind in food processor and set aside. Grate carrots in salad maker or food processor with grater attachment, and set aside. Grind wheat sprouts with some of the soak water, then add all ingredients back into food processor – dried fruit, carrots, spices, and nuts if you’re using them (ground first). Add more soak water, and grind to paste consistency. Smoothe batter out on solid sheets, and dehydrate until each sheet is a crisp dry cracker, about 24-36 hours.

With all crackers, I remove them from the solid sheet after 12 hours, flip them upside down and switch to a mesh sheet. With L'Equip if I'm dehydrating something I know will stick, e.g. nachos crackers made with nuts (oil is sticky) I place a sheet of non-stick baking paper in each solid sheet, exactly fitting the base. Then after 12-18 hours, I flip the solid sheet over onto a mesh sheet, and easily peel the paper off. I continue to dry them upside-down on a mesh sheet, same as with Excalibur (which has non-stick solid sheets).

Crackers store for months in air-tight glass jars in cupboard. Add cotton balls to each jar to absorb any moisture.

Cashew Yogurt Crunch

I combined this recipe from the two recipe books above – Sproutman gave me the yogurt crunch, and Vibrant Living the cashew-cream.

This is the recipe that ended my addiction to chocolate. I used to sit down at my computer with 2-3 large bars of Cadbury's chocolate, I couldn't begin work without it, until I switched to cashew-cream crunch.

Today I begin with a glass of fresh orange juice or green juice, and a banana with a couple of raw crackers. Lots of sugar for my brain – both simple in the juice and banana, and complex in the sprouted-grain crackers – but a far cry from chocolate!

1 C cashews
1 C pure water (use soak water from dates)
1/3 C dates (raw unpitted)
1/2 t vanilla essence

Pit dates and soak for an hour, pour off soak water. Blend cashews and a little soak water, keep adding water until you have consistency of smooth heavy cream. Blend in dates and vanilla. Smoothe batter out on solid sheets, and dehydrate at 92°F (33°C) until it tastes tart and sour, about 6-8 hours. Turn dehydrator up to 115°F (46°C) and continue to dry until crisp, about a day.

The more dates in the cream, the more leathery it will be, less crispy. You can also make this with just cashews and water, one cup of each.

Raw cashew-date cream (without dehydrating) is delicious as a topping on blended fruit, when you want a quick filling meal.

In my growth into raw foods, a turning point was the day I realized fruit is a complete meal for humans, not a between-meal snack.