Last year we had a bumper crop of zucchini.  After our zucchini harvest season was long over I came across a post for zucchini chips. I thought I would definitely try it this year. Well, this year none of our zucchini plants did anything. We even replanted them. We may have had bad seeds. Luckily, we still have quite a bit in the freezer from last year. Last year we did not plant any summer squash. This year we did and it is doing well and we are experiencing a lot of squash.

So, I searched the ole internet to see if I could dehydrate squash into squash chips like the zucchini chip post I had seen. I did indeed find some posts suggesting squash or zucchini could be dehydrated. So, Jon and I thought we’d give it a try and see how it turned out. We only did a couple of squash as we were not sure how this experiment would go. We sliced the squash about 1/8 inch thick. This was done by hand so there was a slight variance in thickness. However, Jon is a wiz with a knife from all of his years in the restaurant business and they were pretty darn consistent for not using a mandolin.

I lined the dehydrator tray and lightly sprayed them with oil. We decided to just go with salt this first time around. If we liked the squash chips then we would play around with different seasonings.

Squash Slices with Light Oil and Salt

We dehydrating them for about 8 hours and checked them the next morning.

Squash Dehydrated

A couple of the larger slices could probably have dehydrated a little longer, but the smaller slices were crunchy. As you can see they shrunk up considerably.

Jon and I both tried one of the small crunchy ones. It was disgusting! It tasted so bad that we spit it out. Normally, we’ll just choke something on down, but we just couldn’t do it. It took several swallows of grape juice to get the taste out of our mouths.

So, I ask Jon if he thought we should try something different like less oil, different seasoning, etc. or was it just too bad to attempt tweaking the process. We both agreed that it was really just too gross to try to “fix” the issue.

I was disappointed as the idea of squash/zucchini chips sounded like a wonderful thing. Who doesn’t love potato chips?!? Who wouldn’t want a healthy, homemade, viable replacement for them?!? I guess some people like dehydrated squash chips, but I just do not get it at all.

At least the chickens liked them!