NESCO Gardenmaster Pro Food Dehydrator, 8 Trays, White

Great dehydrator. I got this about 10 days ago and have been putting it through its paces. I have dried sweet corn, peas, peas and carrots mix, green beans (both cut and french style), mushrooms, strawberries, apples, bananas, pineapple, celery, and hash brown potatoes. Today I am going to try butternut squash (grated — and blanched — to make it dry faster, and I use it to make a pureed soup so I don’t need chunks), mango, and kiwi, and don’t expect any problems.I am so glad I got this model because it comes with things I didn’t know I would need. I would have either had to buy the accessories, or I would have just not has as good an experience drying food. First if all, when I run it, I love that I have 8 trays so I can fill the thing up. The 8 mesh liner things are something I would not have thought of, but now I use them with every time. When drying corn or peas, the food shrinks down so small that it would fall through the tray slats if I didn’t use the mesh liners. With fruit, the food doesn’t stick as bad when using the mesh liners (tip: flip the fruit over after about an hour and that helps as well). Lastly, the mesh liners are so much easier to clean than the trays themselves, so I just use the liners over the tray and it saves clean-up effort.The machine itself is a great design. The design of the air flow means that you don’t have to rotate trays — unlike my old one. The heat is pretty true as well. I set it for 135, and stuck a temperature probe down the center hole and it was spot on. The machine is bigger than my old unheated one (that I gave away) and holds a lot. It dries really quickly, and the food shrinks down insanely small. I figure I could dry at least 50 of the 12 oz bags of frozen corn, peas, or pea/carrot dice blend and they would fit in a dozen wide mouth quart jars. (Beans and hash brown potatoes would not shrink down as small.) I have reconstituted every vegetable I have dried to see if it is worth it, and so far the only one that isn’t a great success is celery (2 bunches shrunk down to about 1 cup!), but I figure I use that as the base with onions when I make soup, and I can just pulverize the dried stuff into powder so I still get the flavor. Just remember to blanch the things that need to be blanched (most vegetables) or save yourself some effort and buy frozen vegetables (which are already blanched).The only criticism I have is that the fan is rather noisy. Annoyingly so. I can’t have it running in the kitchen because we have an open concept and it is too loud to be running while we are doing anything in the living room. I run it in the laundry room, and that is my work around. Some people don’t like that it doesn’t have a timer, but I have several plug in timers we use when we go in vacation so I just pulled one out to use when I want to let the machine run for awhile (but not all night) after I go to bed. Since I already have a timer, it wasn’t worth the extra cost to buy a machine with one built in. The machine is certainly more expensive than Nesco’s base model, but with the extra trays, mesh liners, and fruit leather trays, the price evens out and it is nice to just get it all in one shot. The plus in that is that everything fits in the box for storage, so I don’t have extra trays that don’t fit in the box. It’s a big box though…it certainly isn’t going to fit under any bed!

Set and forget. Trays will fit together with slight pressure from the top.Fruit leather: 2 cups per tray dried in 8 hours. 3 cups per tray dried in 2.5 days.Apricot halves needed 3 days, seemed to go faster when I rotated them to skin side up after 2 days.Fan is as loud as a box fan, but the circulating air helps dry the food.Temperature dial: when I set it for 140, my thermometer read 140