According to the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, Americans consume a third of their daily calories from snacks. Many pre-packaged bars, cookies, dried fruit and jerky are high in salt, sugar, preservatives and additives.

Dehydrating your own food allows you to swap out those questionable ingredients for healthy, nutrition-dense alternatives that allow the true flavors of natural foods to shine through. Think dehydrated fruits and vegetables, or meats and fish jerky.

You can also dry herbs and flowers (to decorate cakes or make your own potpourri and sachets) and make granola. It’s easy to get hooked on dehydrating.

Instead of roses: a bright red food dehydrator. Photo courtesy Excalibur.

Man has been dehydrating for thousands of years, initially to preserve meat and other foods in the millennia prior to refrigeration. Today, our most commonly enjoyed dehydrated foods include jerky and bottled herbs. Many “practitioners” dehydrate summer crops—berries, peaches, tomatoes—for enjoyment through the winter.

Dehydration is used everywhere from hunters’ cabins to Michelin-star kitchens.

Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià, Dan Barber, Matthew Lightner, Sam Mason, Sarma Melngailis, Iliana Regan, Rich Torrisi and Ming Tsai dehydrate ingredients to intensify and concentrate flavors, decrease marinating time, thicken sauces and soften saturated fats like coconut oil or cacao butter.

THE EXCALIBUR DEHYDRATOR

Compact enough to fit on your kitchen counter, the Excalibur Dehydrator has a patented airflow drying system to optimize speed in drying, among other features. It is up to 10 times faster than common round dehydrators, and available in a variety of color finishes and sizes, including commercial and non-commercial grade units.

You pay for quality, of course. Excalibur machines are top of the line, and these are $349 at ExcaliburDehydrator.com.

But if you enjoy kale chips, carrot chips, apple chips and the like, it will pay for itself in less than a year. Instead of baking cookies, bring your hosts your homemade snacks.

You can package the dehydrator with a book:

Here’s an easy Valentine dish: baked potato filled with beets and feta, with a refreshing mint salad on the side. The idea is to stuff the baked potato with beets and feta instead of sour cream and chives.

Love Beets, which developed this recipe, likes to serve it with a protein of choice and a mint salad. It takes only 10 minutes of prep time, plus an hour-plus to bake the potatoes.

If you don’t want a side salad of mint, you can use the leaves in the beet and feta salad; or substitute another herb chiffonade with the beets and feta (basil is a good choice).
 
 
RECIPE: STUFFED BAKED POTATOES WITH BEETS & FETA CHEESE

Ingredients For 4 Servings

 
For The Salad

Baked potato stuffed with beets and feta (photo courtesy Love Beets).

[2] Feta cheese. You can garnish the plate with some Mediterranean black olives, if you like (photo courtesy Aragec N/A).

 
Preparation

1. PREHEAT the oven to 400°F. Place the potatoes directly on the oven rack and bake for 1¼ to 1½ hours until soft when pierced with a fork. Alternatively, you can par-cook in a microwave on high for 10-15 minutes, then put in the oven to finish baking, reducing the cooking time accordingly.

2. MAKE the salad: Whisk together the oil, vinegar and sugar in a large bowl. Season to taste with a little salt and freshly ground black pepper. Use 2 teaspoons to lightly dress the mint. If you don’t want a side salad of mint, make a chiffonade of some of the leaves, to taste, and add them to the beet salad along with the feta, in step 4.

3. TOAST the pine nuts in a dry frying pan until golden brown. Add to the salad dressing, along with the beets, onion and black olives. Set aside for the flavors to mingle.

4. MIX the feta cheese into the salad just before serving. Cut open each baked potato with an X, breaking up the inside a bit with a fork (add a little butter if desired). Spoon the beet and feta salad into the potatoes and serve immediately.
  

Beyond Middle Eastern and Indian markets, there’s not much rose-flavored food in the U.S. (we occasionally find rose marshmallows at fine confectioners). But rose is a flavor that fits right in with Valentine’s Day, and fashionable mixologists create menus of rose syrup-accented cocktails.

WHAT IS ROSE SYRUP?

Rose syrup is rose water with sugar added—essentially, rose-flavored simple syrup. Rose water itself is distilled from rose petals as a by-product of the rose oil (attar of roses) produced for perfumes.

First distilled by Muslim chemists in medieval times, both rose syrup and rose water add a subtle rose flavor and aroma to sweet foods. You can use rose water and sugar in beverages, but for confections and baked goods you need syrup, which won’t dilute the batter, dough, etc.

ROSE COCKTAILS

Our favorite, easy rose cocktail is a Champagne Cocktail sweetened with rose syrup instead of the conventional sugar cube. There’s a Rose Martini recipe below. You can create other cocktails, or add the syrup to club soda for a mocktail.

You can buy rose syrup in pink or clear hues, or make your own from rose water. You can whip it up in about 10 minutes and color it as light or deep rose as you like. If, after the first batch, you want even more rose flavor, exchange the tap water for more rose water.

If you decide to distill your own rose water from rose petals (our friends with a large rose garden like to do this), note that only dark red roses impart much color; you may have to supplement with food color.
 

RECIPE: ROSE SYRUP (ROSE SIMPLE SYRUP)

 
Preparation

1. BRING the water to a boil. Add the sugar and dissolve, stirring constantly. When completely dissolved, remove the pan from the heat. Do not over-boil.

2. ADD red food color as desired.

3. COOL, then store in an airtight container in the fridge.

Ingredients For 1 Cocktail

 
Preparation

1. ADD ingredients including ice to a cocktail shaker. Shake well and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

2. Garnish and serve.
 
MORE VALENTINE COCKTAIL RECIPES

*Rose petals or other flowers used for garnish must be organic—not sprayed with chemical pesticides.