My dad used to be obsessed with old dried out marshmallows. His absolute favorite was what he called peep jerky. You know the marshmallow birds and rabbits that are popular around Easter? He’d get a pack and open them up and wait for them to turn hard as a rock. I personally thought this was an abomination. Eventually, I even found the high shelf in the back pantry where he would set up a line of marshmallows or peeps to make his marshmallow or peep jerky. I then married a woman who does the exact same thing. She has a similar method for how to dehydrate marshmallows.
Just today, I found another bag of marshmallows with a hole in it. The first time I saw it, I thought there was a mouse getting into our marshmallows. Turns out my wife just wanted the marshmallows all dry and stale. They would then slowly turn into rocks, and I’d usually find them once the damage was done. We finally had to get a few bags of marshmallows at a time and designate some as to not be punctured and ruined, at least for people who don’t like rock marshmallows.
Humidity and Dehydrated Marshmallows
The challenge for her came when we moved away from the desert and to the more humid Midwest. She ripped open a bag and it didn’t dry out. In fact, it turned into a gooey mess. They all stuck together and she was disappointed. I had my moment of victory, but then she started buying the hard cereal marshmallows on amazon. Yes, you hard marshmallow lovers, its possible to buy a dang bag of just cereal marshmallows. She has an unhealthy obsession with them. As I went to find this link, Amazon was good enough to tell me that she has ordered this bag 6 times. I think she’s ordered others, but this is her go to.
I thought this was absurd, so we went back to trying to make the original idea, drying out marshmallows.
Recipe: How to Dehydrate Marshmallows
How do you dehydrate marshmallows? Put them on your dehydrator tray. If they’re too big you can cut them up, but then be sure to coat them in powdered sugar. You put them on your dehydrator for 3-5 hours. You wait for them to cool and then you test them. If they are gooey, it needs to go longer.
What Dehydrator Should I Get to Dehydrate Marshmallows?
A dehydrator pulls moisture out of the food you’re trying to preserve, or dry out. It does this with warm dry air. The efficiency of how that air can get to the food determines how fast it takes to dehydrate the food, and how much food you can dry effectively. To do that, you need a heating element and air flow. The first dehydrator I owned had a heating element, but it didn’t have a fan. Because of that, I could only effectively dry only a couple trays at a time. Even drying just two racks of blueberries, the bottom rack would dry, but the top rack didn’t even look like it was halfway done. You need that airflow.
If you’re looking for a good starter dehydrator, this model is what you want. It’s relatively small and simple, but it has the heating element, and it has the fan. The fan isn’t perfect with air flow, so the top racks still won’t dry as fast as the bottom racks, but they still dry. From someone who didn’t have that feature, trust, me, that’s a big deal.
If you’re serious about food preservation, this baby is the Cadillac of food dehydrators. It has better temperature control and much better air flow throughout, so it gives a consistent dry, and you can adjust it to your food’s needs. Hint- you don’t want to do your marshmallows too hot or they’ll just melt into a gooey mess. The racks are also stainless steel, instead of plastic. Easier to clean and much more durable. This is advertised as a commercial grade dehydrator, but at 7 racks, isn’t so big that it’ll overwhelm your space. It costs about 4x as much as what we’re calling the starter model, but its easy to see where the benefit from the extra cost is going.
Uses for Dehydrated Marshmallows
The two main applications, other than eating them plain, is in cereal and in hot chocolate mix. I’m not an eat it plain person like my wife or my dad, but I love those little dehydrated marshmallows in hot chocolate. I also, no joke, once bought a bag of Marshmallow Mateys cereal, and picked out all the marshmallows and had a bowl of just marshmallows. For the record, this was a bit too much marshmallow, but I decided that Lucky Charms and Marshmallow Mateys need to switch the ratios of the marshmallows and the grain cereal. That’s what I’m looking for. Marshmallows in cereal just works. However you like them, in a SHTF scenario, you can make your own marshmallows, and then you can dehydrate them yourself.
Dehydrating marshmallows is a fun experiment to do with kids. It introduces kids to dehydrating food in a way that’s pretty clean and easy. Another fun prepping activity to do with kids is Making Olive Oil Candles>
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