Making Home-Dehydrated Vegetables to Cope with Hard Times

After the outbreaks in Wuhan, Xi'an, and Shanghai, there were problems with broken supply chains, and ordinary people could hardly buy vegetables. China is pursuing a "dynamic zero-COVID" policy for pandemic prevention, which is unlikely to change in the short term. Ordinary residents must learn survival skills for difficult times and master better ways of storing vegetables.

I grew up in the countryside. When I was a child, whenever the vegetable harvest season arrived, the elders in my family would sun-dry various preserved vegetables, such as dried radish, dried cabbage, dried cowpeas, and dried long beans. Dried vegetables are easy to store, though their color, aroma, and flavor are somewhat lost. But the rural approach is worth borrowing; in times like these, some dried vegetables should be stored. In addition, one can borrow the rural method of sun-drying vegetables to make home-dehydrated vegetables.

Home-dehydrated vegetables are different from sun-dried preserved vegetables: home-dehydrated vegetables need not be dried so thoroughly; they only need to be dried to the point where they can be stored long-term in the refrigerator. The method is simple: wash the vegetables, peel them, cut them into extremely fine, thin strips or slices, and spread them on a well-ventilated balcony for a day or two. Once the vegetables have lost most of their water (but have not changed color), put them in sealed bags and store them in the refrigerator. Generally, after dehydration vegetables shrink to about one-fifth of their original volume, so a refrigerator of the same capacity can hold five times as much home-dehydrated vegetables as fresh.

When eating home-dehydrated vegetables, simply soak them in water for a few minutes and they recover the color, aroma, and flavor of fresh vegetables, with a taste almost indistinguishable from fresh vegetables and considerably better than dried preserved vegetables; the nutrients are not lost. Home-dehydrated vegetables can be stored either in the refrigerator's fresh compartment or in the freezer. When not eating them, take them out now and then to air for half a day; they can be kept for over half a year.

Radishes, carrots, lettuce, onions, cabbage, Napa cabbage, winter melon, bitter melon, eggplant, celery, and other vegetables can all be made into home-dehydrated vegetables. Cowpeas and long beans should first be blanched in water before sun-drying.

Vegetables are important foods in our daily diet and provide many essential nutrients. Do not wait until disaster strikes before stockpiling; be mindful in ordinary times. Each time you buy groceries, buy a little extra vegetables—eat some fresh, and dehydrate the rest for emergency storage. That way, once an emergency occurs, our home-dehydrated vegetables can play an important role.

Now I follow this vegetable-storage plan at home: store some dried vegetables, such as shiitake mushrooms, wood ear, daylily flowers, dried cowpeas, dried cabbage, dried eggplant, dried radish shreds, and peanuts; make home-dehydrated vegetables, sunning some on the balcony every day until two-thirds of the refrigerator is filled with home-dehydrated vegetables; and stock a small amount of fresh vegetables. Fresh vegetables do not keep well; no matter how good a refrigerator or freezer is, they cannot be kept for long, so storing too many fresh vegetables is unrealistic.

With this combination, even if our community is locked down due to cases and buying groceries becomes difficult, we will not be left without vegetables to eat.