Cabela's Commercial Grade 80L Dehydrator

Well, I started off with an excellent dehydrator that I got from my Mom and Dad for free which worked great, but my capacity demands have now changed. Back when I was just testing the waters with using a dehydrator to prepare the ingredients for my backpacking meals and/or dehydrating premade meals the little sub-5 sqft dehydrator was great. I really came across this idea of dehydrating my meals and using the FBC cooking method after buying the book Freezer Bag Cooking. Since than I have also come across One Pan Wonders, which has a lot of good meals as well that can be easily made with an FBC method.

Basically what sprung this purchase was that I was starting to dehydrate more and more stuff, from large batches of fruits, to full meals, to staple ingredients for my meals (ground turkey). I use ground turkey in most of my meals that require meat, I use it mainly because it is cheap as all get out at costco for a very lean meat ($2.30 a lb). The more I dehydrated stuff, the more I had to do multiple batches. Doing multiple batches day after day got really old and actually got me to start slowing down my dehydrating by making me put it off. The little dehydrator would hold 3lbs of ground turkey filled to the brim and take nearly 12 hours to dehydrate it. The new dehydrator took 7 hours for 6.4lbs + a lot of other stuff....

Cabela's is switching their model color from white to black and are selling off the white models for $80 less than retail. Which equated out to the same cost as some of the smaller dehydrators like the Excaliber that I had been looking into buying. So for the same cost I got a lot larger dryer. I may of had to dip into my funds to pay for next quarter to buy it... but I got it and it should last a very long time and more than pay for itself with time. Especially how much I do backpacking and outdoors sports.

Specifications copied from Cabelas.com:

Fully insulated housing Digital thermostat/timer Built-in drain reservoir 12 - 21.5" x 16" non stick drying racks fully digital controls, these units let you set the exact temperature and time needed to reach your desired results 80 liter - 21-1/8"H x 17-3/8"D x 23-1/2"W

Here's a picture of the old dehydrator next to the new dehydrator.


Here's a picture of the aftermath of one single run of the dehydrator. 6.4lbs of ground turkey (3.2lbs as browned turkey, 1.6lbs as Taco Turkey and 1.6lbs ground BBQ Turkey burgers), 2 - 12.5oz cans of Kirkland canned chicken, and 3 cans of Nalley Turkey chili.


Overall I am very impressed with the efficiency and capacity of this dryer. I will now be able to assemble the majority of everything that I will need to dehydrate and make a single run instead of multiple small runs. The only disappointment is that the top tray does not have a lot of room, so if it's a fairly thick item like some fruits and the beginning of dehydration it won't fit, so in reality it's an 11 tray dryer...

Note:
The top shelf only has 3/8" of space, so spreads like Hummus, re-fried beans or other thin sliced meats a 1/4" thick or less will work fine. The thicker sliced fruits or uneven foods like chicken chunks and unevenly sized ground meat didn't fit without touching the top of the dehydrator which is fairly undesirable.