Oven dehydration mode and door

[jehlydonuts]

Hi All,

My oven has a convection dehydration setting that I have never used. The oven manual tells me I need to buy a "dehydration kit", which happens to be expensive and seems to really only prop open the door for air flow. However, the convection fan runs on the dehydration setting, so I am not sure why the door would need to be open at all. Does anyone have experience with this? I am thinking about just propping the door open an inch or so with something not flammable. My goal is to dehydrate fruit, for which even the slightest amount of smoke from my grill/smoker seems to be too much. Thanks!

[DavidNorcross]

We have a dehydrator. I just have no experience dehydrating in an oven. The principals should be the same though. Depending upon the food it is all time and temp.

[rickgregory]

propping the door open might be to let it go lower that it otherwise could. For example, my oven goes down to 170F and that's it. Maybe 170F is too hot for some things like fruit (though it works fine for jerky).

[jehlydonuts]

That's an interesting idea and makes the most sense to me. I will give it a try at some point and post back.

[jehlydonuts]

Just following up on the above. So I marinated strips of flank steak for 48 hours, placed them on two cooling racks (typically used for cookies in my house), and cooked as follows:

- Heated oven to 300F
- Reduced to 275F and inserted trays
- Baked for 10 mins
- Propped oven door open with a spoon, but found I had to be sure the button that told the oven the door was closed was pressed down by the spoon handle
- Turned oven to convection setting and lowered temperature to 150F (my oven apparently allows this)
- Five hours later had *terrific* beef jerky

Haven't tried it with fruit yet, but will let you know how it goes. Thanks.

[texastweeter]

I have a dehydration setting for my kit henaid oven, no kit required though. Holds all the way down to 140° with high fan.

[jehlydonuts]

I am going to repeat the beef recipe and simply not prop the door open, i.e., use only the convection fan for the dehydration. My experience with convection makes me think that propping the door open may not actually be necessary.

[Murdy]

When I was a kid, my friend's mom used to dehydrate venison jerky in a regular old electric stove. She'd hand the strips over the oven racks (quite a mess iirc) and prop the door open. I don't recall how long it took or the temperature, but I imagine the lowest setting.

[MBMorgan]

From GE on the use of their oven models with a dehydration feature:

https://products.geappliances.com/ap...ture%20removal.

[jehlydonuts]

If it's true for the GE convection, it's probably true for mine: "During dehydration, your oven door must remain partially open to allow for air circulation and moisture removal". Thanks for finding that.

[mrteddyprincess]

I have used electric analog ovens to dehydrate before. I'd keep the heat set just below 212 F and I used an oven mitt doubled over to prop open the door about an inch. In my mind I was letting the moisture out of the cooking area. I did a LOT of deer jerky that way. Also dried peppers from the garden using that method.