This year, I gave my sister and brother-in-law a 72 hour kit with homemade and dehydrated baby food. As I've been telling people about it, they wanted to know how I did it, so I thought I'd try my hand at a tutorial blog.
To start, cook (I prefer to steam) your fruits or vegetables I've used spinach (below), carrots, sweet potatoes, bananas, apples, rice, and butternut squash. This seems to work with anything.
After the food is cooked, puree it. If you're just making baby food, this where you stop.
Now you can dehydrate the baby food. I lined my dehydrator trays with saran wrap and also tried the liners that come with the dehydrator. Either way works well. I did find that the thinner the puree, the better it dried. If the puree was thicker, I found it didn't dry as well because there would be parts where I wasn't able to spread it thin enough to dry evenly. Also, it was at this stage that I realized that spinach wasn't the best because it doesn't look the most appealing.
Once it's dry the baby food will look like one of the two pictures below. Sometimes it dries in a big circle and sometimes it cracks. Both of these are just fine.
Once it's completely dry, put it back in the blender and grind it to a nice powder. I found that the flat blade works best. The other blade threw too much in the air and didn't pulverize it well enough.
In the end, you'll get a nice powder. To reconstitute just add water. It only takes about 1 Tablespoon to 1/8 to 1/4 cup water.
There ya have it. Easy peasy dried baby food. Perfect for camping, traveling, and 72 hour kits.
