Hi Ana, I don’t feel 100% confident in answering this from a food safety perspective. I think the “official” answer for food safety would be “better safe than sorry.” However, since the dehydrator was still warm it sounds like the food wasn’t sitting for hours. Personally, I would turn the dehydrator back on and finish drying them. Then I would put them into containers (but not vacuum sealed) and keep an eye on them for a few days. Does any mold develop? Do they start to smell off? But, ultimately, you’ll have to judge what you’re comfortable with.
In terms of the racks, just wash and sanitize as you would after any batch. For the fan, you’ll want to check the instruction manual, though I don’t think you’d have to disinfect it in this case.

Thanks for the response. Under the conditions you mentioned: 1.) starting with very wet food 2.) temporarily increasing the temp then return back to the recommended temp – we agree with you. Under those circumstances, the risk of hard-casing is probably very minimal. And you probably can speed up the drying process a little bit. However, since we are attempting to give direction to a wide-range of dehydrator users (a lot of first-timers), we often rely on the simplest and safest option. Which for most people is going to be: set it to the appropriate temperature and walk away. Thanks for sharing. It’s a very valid insight. Sounds like it isn’t your first dehydrating rodeo!

I disagree to a point. If the food is still very wet you can boost the heat about 20°F above the recommended amount until it is no longer very wet. This is due to water evaporating off the food and carrying heat off with it so that although the dehydrator is 20°F higher the food itself won’t surpass it’s maximum recommended heat. This can cut drying times in half without negatively effecting the food dried so long as the heat is reduced to the recommended heat after 2-3 hours.

Great point! Also when certain produce comes into season dehydrate as much as you can! A big harvest of zucchini? Way too many apples? Dehydrate them for later.

Other than printing the whole page as a pdf, unfortunately, no. Not yet anyway. But that is a really great suggestion and we are going to look into providing PDF version.