Dehydrating Lettuce

Having to harvest all the remaining lettuce at once due to the frost warning has us in a glut of lettuce.  Last week, with all the excess lettuce I had, I tried making lettuce soup.  Awful.  It was extremely bitter.  The soup might work with iceberg lettuce but not with green leafy types.

So, this time I decided to dehydrate the lettuce.  I figured I would use the crumbled lettuce a little like parsley and mix it into meat loaf and stuff like that.  I also thought that if I powder it, I could add a small amount to my protein smoothies.  Lettuce has a lot of vitamins A & C, so concentrated lettuce would be a good addition as long as it didn't affect the flavour.

First, though, I had to wash and trim the lettuce.  I remove all the tough ribs from the lettuce.  This took quite awhile.  I had a completely full sink of harvested lettuce.  You can see the sink on the left has the de-ribbed leaves.

Once I had trimmed all the lettuce, I drained the leaves and spun them in the salad spinner to dry them as much as possible.  I ended up with two large bowls of lettuce.

I distributed the lettuce on 5 trays in my dehydrator.

After 10 hours on the recommended heat setting (40ºC), I rotated the trays and let them dry a further 2 hours.

They reduced in volume by half.

However, once I crumbled the dried leaves, I was left with this:

Quite the volume change!

From the dried, crumbled leaves, I put half into a mason jar to use as is.  The other half I powdered in my nut and spice grinder.

I tried out the lettuce powder in my regular smoothie and I couldn't taste it at all.  There were little tiny green flecks, though.  I also only used about 1/2 teaspoon of the powder.