We eat a large amount of dried foods and jerky, but it’s hard to find really pure commercially-made jerky that my family can eat due to food allergies, etc. I was a bit hesitant about buying a dehydrator that had zero reviews, but boy am I glad I did. I have an old dehydrator that my mom and dad gave me years ago that is just a bit pathetic in how long it takes. My smoker takes quite a while also. The Tribest Sedona ADC-S101-B is fast, accurate, easy-to-use and well worth the price. My first batch of jerky, I made four flavors with about 10 ½ pounds of meat sliced to 1/8. I was able to fit about 8 pounds of it in one batch, using all 9 shelves, with some free space. (I was dividing the batches by flavor.) After the 8-pound 9-shelf batch, I did the last three pounds or so spread over three shelves spaced out in the dehydrator. The first large batch was fully dehydrated with one hour on Fast at 154 degrees and four hours on Raw at 120 degrees. The second smaller batch was fully dehydrated with one hour on Fast and three hours on Raw. Quite a bit of difference from my usual batches of 12 hours in my smoker. Those are my results living in semi-arid high-altitude area. My next experiment will be three different types of green beans, with my old dehydrator taking a couple of days to dry. I expect the Tribest Sedona to dry them in an hour, maybe two maximum. Overall, this dehydrator is very easy to use if you walk through the instructions once. The controls will be a bit baffling otherwise. I do wish the top shelf wasn’t so close to the top of the dehydrator. You have to put it in very carefully and make sure you have very thinly sliced foods on it. That said, I do all meats at 1/8”, so they fit easily. Vegetables may be a different story. I contacted the company asking why the shelf was so close and they basically responded that it was to save space. Despite my misgivings about the lack of space for the top shelf, everything on it dried just as quickly as that on all the other shelves. My other concern was that the metal of the shelves seems to be an average stainless steel, rather than a super high quality. The company asks you to hand-wash the shelves and not put them in a dishwasher. I’m going to find some large-hold silicone mesh mats to put down to help keep the trays clean. With the plain shelves, I am spraying them with canola oil to help the jerky not to stick. I found the temperatures to be very accurate, testing it with wired thermometers. The variance of temperature between the top and bottom of the dehydrator was 4 degrees. The company recommends that you rotate the shelves to make sure everything dries evenly, and I did that once during the large batch. It dried so evenly that I don’t think I’ll bother with rotating the trays in the future. I made four flavors of jerky with this: biltong, teriyaki, yukpo (Korean wedding gift), and Thai. They all came out dried to an awesome texture with great flavor. I’m very pleased with this dehydrator. It’s made making jerky SO much easier. I will be getting a lot of use out of it. This review will not show a VP tag because I bought my dehydrator where I could return it locally because I was so concerned about the lack of reviews. I’m reviewing it here on Amazon, because I would have purchased it on Amazon if it had had reviews. At the time of this review, this Tribest Sedona dehydrator normally runs about $600, but you can find it on sale for about $500 at times. Let Amazon donate to your favorite charity! Use Amazon Smile (smile.amazon.com) when you order and Amazon will donate to the charity of your choice when you make a qualifying purchase. Check out how Amazon Smile works at https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_rspo_laas_aas. My shopping is donating to my favorite charity, Canines for Independence at no cost to me. Awesome!
