Dehydrated Onions

This will be a Christmas gift for our parents this year.  We made these for them last year and they both came back and asked if we had anymore.  While they can be used in cooking we use them crunched on top of salad and as a sort of potato chip.  Dancer will just eat them straight of the bag for a snack but a handful is also good along side a sandwich. 

I have two dehydrators and it took about two days to dry 22 pounds of onions.  I do not run my dehydrators when we are gone, or at night, so that is strictly day time hours for drying  time.  I buy them in bulk from our organic food co-op so the price is very reasonable.  The prep for these is very simple, just peel and slice the onions thin.  This batch of onions had us crying like babies so we often needed to stop and wipe our eyes.  Not only the person cutting the onions was crying, anyone in the room was crying, that is how strong they were.

Next, we lay them out on the drying trays, put the dehydrator together and turn it on.  The last step is just to take them off the trays and into plastic sealable bags.  For some reason when they dry they manage to get themselves wrapped around the slots in the trays so this is actually the hardest part of the whole process. 

The 22 pounds of onions ended up being a huge mixing bowl full, enough for each of our parents to get a big bag.  I wanted to have a picture on here of how they look after but blogger just wasn't cooperating.