This Food Dehydrator Made Me a Snack Genius (and a Better Person)

Have you ever been responsible for an entire haul of perfectly good fruit going bad? Are you consumed with regret for not freezing that banana sooner, or failing to eat that tomato before it got mushy? Are you always on the verge of “just making a big salad/juice/pasta to clear out some of this stuff?” Well, friends, your days of missing the windows on fruit, veggies, and even meat should be coming to an end. There are many ways to make better use of your bounties, like learning to make preserves and pickles, becoming a master of sustainable cooking, or just buying less at a time. There’s also an even easier way to make sure you end up snacking on all of your fresh food (without being rushed): a dehydrator.

To many (or at least to me, before I got one), a dehydrator might seem like a mystical device: You put in some apple slices or marinated beef, go drink beer and play PS5 for six to 10 hours, and come back to find a grip of tasty snacks ready for your next trail run attempt to beat Starscourge Radahn (in Elden Ring, duh). But after buying and using one, I’ve learned that, while it is actually magical, the dehydrator totally makes sense. Basically, you’re cooking food at an extremely low temperature for hours and hours (and sometimes more hours) so that it, well, in the words of a colleague here, becomes “un-watered,” i.e., the moisture leaves the food and it dries out into fruit snacks, jerky, or crunchy veggie chips. This is a way to preserve food for way longer than it would originally last, because without the moisture, there’s less chance of mold and decomposition. Since my household creates more food waste than I’d like to admit, I decided to invest in a dehydrator, so that we could turn all that beautiful leftover fruit into beautiful leftover drier fruit. 

I bought a Cosori five-tray dehydrator, which has a very cool tech-futuristic vibe to it. First, I think it actually looks pretty cool, definitely neater than the ones that look like ovens; this one looks more like the big ol’ towers we’ll eventually live in (Silo watchers, rise up). The controls are extremely basic—all you have to do is set the temperature, which goes up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, and the time. Setting it to 140 degrees for 8 hours, for example, takes about three seconds, which I appreciate, especially compared to the G-Shock watch I used last night to time stages in the curry I was making (since it had a very difficult-to-reach recessed reset button). Then, you just layer your food among the five levels and wait for the magic. All in all, this dehydrator makes the process hella easy, which is pretty impressive for a countertop appliance that costs less than 50 bucks.

Because I am crazy, however, I didn’t just stop at fruit with this bad boy. No, I crowdsourced this research, seeking out the most ridiculous things to test in my new dehydrator. A brainstorming meeting here at VICE yielded some wild recommendations that included pickles, eggs, gummies, and Cheetos; I asked some friends on Instagram, where a few winning suggestions included spicy mustard, White Castle, mozzarella sticks, caviar, watermelon, ketchup, Nerds Gummy Clusters, ice, my cat (American Psycho much?), my dreams (dark!), toothpaste, and olives… and those were just the funniest ones. Suffice it to say, the fam came through. 

The final menu for my initial sessions with the dehydrator included: apricot, apple, mango, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Trolli Sour Bite Crawlers, and, since I live in Chicago, hot giardiniera (you know, from The Bear). Anyway, yada yada yada, now I have three Michelin stars. JK.

I dehydrated all of it in one go, since having five layers makes it super easy to mix and match. After six hours at 135 degrees Fahrenheit, things were definitely starting to look un-watered. The giardiniera did become rather dry and maintained its spiciness, which made me think I could successfully use it as a weird condiment on a future burger, or maybe do some Noma shit and make some dehydrated giardiniera powder to sprinkle on a fermented hot dog or something.

I’m frankly not sure what I thought would happen to the Trolli gummies, but they basically just became slightly warm and a lot mushier, just a worse version of what had already existed (which in its original state is a masterpiece, for the record). I was hoping the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos might dry out a little more or turn into dust or something, but no such luck; I’m disturbed (though not really surprised) to report that they changed in no observable way. They didn’t even really get warm. I should have known better—these things are designed to withstand the apocalypse. If Oppenheimer couldn’t fuck with these, I don’t know why I thought I could. The fruit, on the other hand, was pretty good. None of it was done at the six-hour mark, so I let it go for a few more hours, and was really thrilled to find that I’d made some delicious dried apple, mango, and apricot. Tasty snacks for my long weekend of watching Love Island.

TL;DR: The Cosori dehydrator is an extremely good investment. Going forward, I plan to un-water a big batch of stuff about once a week, which will hopefully 1) cut down on food waste and 2) give me healthier snacks, so that I can stop eating two to three containers of Oasis hummus a week. 

There are a lot of practical and experimental reasons to own a dehydrator—whether you’re trying to become a beef jerky master, a cracker-maker extraordinaire, a fruit snack king, or an aspiring chef messing with dehydrated tomato powder or whatever. Sure, all it does is take out the moisture from stuff, but as it turns out, it’s a very useful thing to have. Plus, it will absolve you of the guilt of throwing out yet another mushy mango.

Buy the Cosori dehydrator on Amazon.

The Rec Room staff independently selected all of the stuff featured in this story. Want more reviews, recommendations, and red-hot deals?Sign up for our newsletter.