Spyra-Gyra

It’s here! The Angel-hair Spyra-Gyra. The finest Spiral Slicer available. It’s Childs Play. 3 Stunning spaghetti sizes and a flute blade.

The most versatile piece of hand operated equipment around. Makes SpaghettiSalads, Stir Fry veggies, Coleslaw, Decorations, Raw Zucchini Spaghetti,  Potato Nest, and more, in seconds. Watch kids eat their veggies the fun healthy way – Turn veggies into spaghetti.

Go to the Gallery for entertaining images of children enjoying the Spyra-gyra.

Two vegetarians home from the kill

Before we drive home from Johannesburg we usually call in at Carreira Centre in Rebublic Road, Randburg. For many years this has provided a one-stop-shop for a huge range of vegetables and fruit, chinese and Indian food requisites, a cheese shop, dried fruits and nuts and grains, fresh flowers, fish and meat and a vegetarian friendly restaurant all housed in  eight stores in the small centre with plenty of parking.

One night when we returned home and brought all the boxes in, I was so overwhelmed with the colour and variety of the food we had that I laid it all out on the floor and took a photo. We live 50km from the nearest town stocked with a variety of food and even then, the selection is often limited so we stock up. This mass of produce is stored in our “coca-cola” fridge and our 1955 General Electric fridge that I painted black.

When I see the price of fresh produce in other countries I am always so grateful that I live in a country that has such amazingly good weather to enable us to grow and purchase fruit and vegetables so inexpensively.

The ins and outs of Food Dehydrators

There was, and I am sure is, still quite some controversy regarding the enzyme-safe temperatures for dehydrators and the necessity to shift trays when drying.

I did some investigation and also bounced the information off the manufacture of the Ezidri Manufacturers who were  in the past VERY associated with Excalibur in the USA. This is what I came up with.

It had been noticed that the Excalibur had problems with uneven drying and apparently  still do to this day regardless of what they say and you do really have to revert the trays during a drying cycle to obtain the quality of even drying.  Excalibur developed and patented the round version with the converger airflow where the clean air travels up the outside chamber of the unit and when the lid is placed on it pressurizes the air forcing it to flow through the small channel and across the tray of product and convect up and outside the unit. (Like the current Ezidri) Thus providing virtually clean air to each individual tray which the Excalibur can not do. It also does not also have the expanding capability of the Ezidri products.

Ezidri actually started manufacturing this patented unit under license in 1980. In 1995 Ezidri amicably parted company with Excalibur, retaining the patent rights to the converga flow system and made a number of improvements to end up with the current Ezidri models.

Kevin Anderson of Ezidri says “To achieve the ultimate in dehydration the cost of suitable equipment is horrendously expensive and the consumer pricing would be just entirely impractical, plus the many vagaries of thickness, moisture content, sugar content of the produce together with humidity, ambient temperature etc, we settled for as near as possible to supply a machine that would be able  to provide the very highest quality of dehydrated produce at an affordable level. We believe we have achieved this with the EZIDRI.”  We at Healthmakers agree with Kevin – it is a great product!

There was some further information obtained from Excalibur regarding temperature. In particular,  initial using  higher temperature to offset higher moisture content for a couple of hours and then to turn the temperature setting to a lower temperature for the rest of the drying period to produce a higher quality product. The problem with this is that people tend forget to turn it down. The other issue with drying is that sometimes you prepare e.g. crackers that do not require the entire night to dry and who wants to set alarm clocks to get up in the middle of the night to turn the dehydrator off. Well, Healthmakers has come to the rescue by supplying a timer with every Ezidri dehydrator so you can turn the dryer off after 4 or 5 hours and also turn it off for an hour if you have ramped it up to a higher temperature, giving you an hour to remember to turn it down (if you are the forgetful type).

Small Commercial Drying Enterprises
I was fortunate in obtaining some first-hand information about the Ezidri Ultra F1000. “The Ultra FD1000 is the very first model produced for many years and is really our flagship. It is by far the most superior and ‘Rolls-Royce’ of consumer dehydrators and is widely used in many commercial operations because of it’s accuracy and dependability and the expandable feature.

The Ultra model is really the only one that has this high degree of accuracy with our electronics, variance of + – 1% on the variable temperature control. The Snackmaker has a range of + – 2% on the settings, Low Med. High and the Classic, because of the metal thermostat pre-set at the factory to range between 40Co and 60Co – averaging around 55Co over a drying cycle, is not a unit we would recommend for the dedicated Dehydrator. Certainly the Ultra is the optimum unit. In fact very similar to your Juicer range, the very best is probably the most expensive and so it is with Dehydrators.