Dehydrated Sweet Potato Bark "Crackers"
After last summer's experimenting with making my own dehydrated meals for backpacking, found some success with Backpacking Chef's pumpkin bark. The one thing I was missing in the food system was more vegetables. Sure dehydrated zucchini or kale chips were nice, but did not work out due to crushing and their volume due to all the crinkles. Vegetable dust is not very appealing.
So I ventured forth into the tangles of the interwebs and found the raw food dehydrator crazy people. Wow. Dehydrated everything. However, I did notice that many raw foodies have the same issue as many paleo foodies. They want to recreate comfort foods inside their food systems. Grain free paleo based muffins are just a cup of nut flour. Way over the top of what you should be eating calory and fat balance wise. Raw foodies create some very appealing bread like foods using seed flours and a dehydrator. A lot of those recipes call for large amounts of flax seeds/flour. Since I am a man with a prostate gland I'll say a firm "no" to flax. Flax also has the wrong type of Omega 3 oil. One that cannot be used by a human. I have no idea why nearly every raw food "bread" contained a large portion of flax seed when it is clearly not as healthy as other seeds or sources for non grain flours.
What is a paleo dude to do? Sweet Potatoes as the base/binder of course with other vegetables to add volume without bulk. These will become a meal mostly for breakfast with coffee/water.
Sweet Potato - large size about 20-22oz
Zucchini - 1 large about 8oz
Carrots - 2 each about 8oz
Dates, pitted - 2oz
Cherries, tart, pitted and dried - 1oz
Cashews, raw - 3-4oz
Almonds, raw -3-4oz
chia seeds - 3oz
pumpkin seeds, raw - 2.5oz
coconut, shreaded - 1-2oz
pumpkin pie spice mix - 1tsp
Equipment needed: food processor with grating and grinding blades, oven with cookie sheet, dehydrator with at least four racks and fruit leather sheets, large mixing bowls, spoons, narrow spatula, cooking scale, general cooking stuff, bourbon of your choice to smooth out any issues that come up.
Bake the sweet potato at 400 for 30 minutes then turn off the heat and let it continue to cook as the oven cools down. After it has cooled enough to handle take the peel off. I cook these the day before I plan on doing all the serious work.
Soak the dates and cherries in hot water to soften up for grinding.
Process the baked and peeled sweet potato through the grating blade and set aside in large bowl. I find that a slow cooked sweet potato is slightly fiberous still and processes better if grated rather than ground. Grinding blade has resulted in large fiber blobs in my system. Yours may have different results.
Process carrots and zuccihini through grating blade and add to sweet potato.
Swap out grater for grinder blades.
Grind up carrot/zuccihini/sweet potato until it is a mush but not so mushy that you can no longer see the carrot and zucchini pieces/color. Depending on the size of the food processor you may have to do this in two batches.
Place mush back in large bowl.
Add dates, cherries, nuts and chia seeds, coconut to food processor. Do not add pumpkin seeds unless you want them ground up as well. If your coconut is shreaded to a very small size from the bag you can also save this for mixing in later. During the date and cherry grinding the dates and cherries can get stuck to the blade and cause issues. The dates I get up here are hard as rocks and will not grind unless soaked for an hour in hot water. You may have a different experience due to local/better quality dates. The nut and seed mix needs to be chunky without large chunks of dried fruit. Nuts will break down to small pieces like a very course sand. Once at this state add to large mixing bowl.
Sprinkle on pumpkin pie spice mix. If you held out pumpkin seeds or coconut add them in and mix it all up into a well homogenized mush.
Spread out on fruit leather sheets on a rack/tray about 1/4 inch thick evenly over the tray area. This sized batch will fill up two and a half trays in an Excaliber dehydrator. More trays in a round one I would guess.
Dehydrate for about 4 hours at 135 until the top surface is firm and dry. Flip the sheets over and remove the sheet so that the bark is now sitting on an unlined tray/rack. Dehydrate for another 4 to 8 hours depending on conditions. The material needs to be hard and not flexible to be finished dehydrating. During the flipping you can cut the mush into shapes/squares when it is still soft. Careful to not cut the tray/rack/sheet. During dehydrating kids and adults alike will stand over the dehyrdator and say "this stuff smells wonderful" due to the pumpkin pie spices and sweet potatoes.
Once hard I broke mine up into small chunks and vac bagged them. Each bag contains approximately 4oz of dry bark.
Nutritional geek data for 4oz is the following. All are approximate and based on predehydrated analtyical data. I did not compile all the vitamin and mineral data, but there is a lot of vitamin A and enough potassium to consider not taking electrolytes. Lots of fiber as well. Data source is Paleo Track. Wet weight was 52oz. Dry weight was 23oz.
Calories: 487
Carbs: 49g
Protein: 18g
Fats: 26g (almost all from Omega 6 from the nuts so not the healthiest thing going)
potassium: 1,090mg
Sodium: 68mg
