Dehydrated carrot crisps – Supermarket vs homemade

Oh my life!  What have I added into my green smoothie now?  It’s gone all green-blue.  No, I’m not going to give the game away today, guesses below please.

Mystery smoothie

My Dad gave me a dehydrator for Christmas.  At the time I had been reading about the benefits of activating nuts.  The idea goes that to make nuts more digestible, you need to soak them so they start to sprout.  It’s said to break down the poisonous phytic acid in the skin/husk.  Of course, then the nuts are all mushy, so you put them in the dehydrator overnight, and they dry out again.  The texture is different, but I like it, I think they are a bit more crispy-crunchy, if you know what I mean.  My nut activating has rather gone off the boil, I don’t want my dehydrator going all summer, and I can’t always be bothered to soak and dry nuts if I want to eat them.  Plenty of people eat non-activated nuts and are perfectly fine, I’m sure I am.

That’s not to say the dehydrator has gone to waste.  I’ve enjoyed using it for all sorts of other things: banana chips, ‘sundried’ tomatoes, I’ve dried dried pear, onion, beetroot, sweet potato (one of my favourites).

I saw these dehydrated carrot crisps in a supermarket and I knew I had to get my dehydrator out and give it a go. Ingredients in supermarket carrot crisps: carrot, antioxidant (ascorbic acid)

Supermarket carrot crisps

I used my mandoline slicer (thanks again Mum-in-Law) to get some carrot slices really thin and crisp-like

sliced carrots

and put them on the dehydrator when I went to work.

carrots pre-dehydration

Ben turned them off some 5 hours or so later.  They had shriveled up and dulled in colour, but they did look like crisps.  Dull versions of the fried ones you can get in the supermarket masquerading as something healthy.

supermarket vs homemade

I’m guessing that the supermarket versions kept their colour because of the antioxidant added to them.  I wonder what makes them go all ‘puffy’?  They rather remind me of frazzles, the bacon crisps (I could be wrong though, not had them for years).

They were tasty, carroty, as you would expect.  I think my favourite attempt at vegetable dehydrated crisps was the sweet potato.  They were starchy enough to create a really good texture and sweet taste.

I tried a second attempt at these.  I cut the carrots thicker, and blanched them in water with cider vinegar added.  It didn’t make a difference though – they probably took longer to dehydrate, some of them were a bit chewy while others were done.  I didn’t bother to take a photo because they looked the same.

Come on, guesses below: what’s the secret ingredient in my smoothie?

Tagged: carrot, carrot crisps, dehydrator, Food dehydrator, gluten free, Phytic acid, vegan