How To Dehydrate Corn and Green Beans

Did you know that you can dehydrate frozen vegetables straight from the freezer? Are you wondering why on earth a person would want to do that? I wondered that as well. Until I thought about it some more and read some more about it. It makes sense for long term storage and dehydrated vegetables take up considerably less space than vegetables in the freezer.

Frozen vegetables are the easiest thing in the world to dehydrate. There is no prep at all. Just take the vegetables, still frozen, spread them out on trays and start the dehydrator.

You’ll know that they are fully dehydrated when they click when you drop them on the counter. At that point, remove them from the trays and pour them into a storage jar.

The real question here was whether or not they would rehydrate properly. I already knew what not to do. So, I was anxious to see how just pouring boiling water over them would work. I’ll tell you now that it did work and they were great.

I poured about a cup each of dehydrated corn and green beans into a bowl. Then I filled the bowl with boiling water. Once the vegetables were soft, I drained the water and had perfectly rehydrated vegetables to use in my Italian Vegetable Soup.

I love this soup, because it is the most versatile of all the soups I make. This time I added some sauteed orange bell peppers as well as some bigger pieces of sauteed sweet onions. I used a bag of pinto beans and a bag of small red beans straight from my freezer as well.

I was very happy with the end result and I absolutely love that I now have corn and vegetables stored in my pantry that are perfect for cooking into different recipes as I need them.

I’m including one last close up of my bowl. I am absolutely thrilled with how well the corn and green beans rehydrated. I’ve read some stories that described frozen vegetables not rehydrating well after being dehydrated, but that was not the case for me. I suspect that using the better quality organic frozen vegetables might have something to do with it. Whatever the reason, I’ll be using the same huge bags from Costco again and again. I love that I can now store 5 lbs of great tasting green beans and corn inside a quart size mason jar!