Can you Really Cook with Freeze Dried Foods?

hey everybody welcome back to live intuitions homestead today we want to show you guys how we are taking advantage of some of the holiday sales that are going on at our local grocery store by buying things at the grocery store and putting them in the freeze dryer this is something that is going to save us not only money in the long run because as you know everything seems to be going up in price these days but right now things are extra low because of some holiday sales that are going on now you all know that we try really hard to grow and raise most of our own food but there are some things that either we don't find success in growing on particular seasons or this climate just isn't right for growing some things so it's with these holiday sales that we use to fill in some of those holes in some of those gaps right and there's some things that we grow a lot of like say green beans which is actually one of the things we're going to be freeze drying today but we can all of the green beans or we eat them fresh we don't you know we didn't haven't saved enough this year to then freeze and freeze dry our own green beans and there are several things like that throughout the year that we can find good deals on at the store and then those are perfect to go through the freeze dryer for long-term and short-term storage now if you don't have a freeze dryer this is still a great time to be stocking up on some of those foods that go on tremendous sales this time of year but there are things that if you do have a freeze dryer are perfect candidates for freeze drying what we're going to be doing today is actually frozen mixed vegetables they were on sale at our local grocery store this week for 79 cents a bag and because they're already frozen it's easy to bring them home basically pour them on the freeze dryer trays throw them in the freeze dryer and in 24 hours you have perfect freeze-dried vegetables but if you don't have a freeze dryer you can just bring them home and put them in the freezer and use them all year long right or you could dehydrate them if that's something that you want to do just remember that the shelf life on dehydrated isn't nearly the same as the shelf life on freeze-dried which is why really the main reason that we switched from doing dehydrating to freeze drying right and now while we're on that subject we want to just quickly tell you the reasons why we are starting to freeze dry a lot more things rather than dehydrate or just put in the freezer right to be honest since we got the freeze dryer we haven't really dehydrated no anything anymore we still have our dehydrator but uh we really haven't used it since we got the freeze dryer so the main reason that we started freeze drying was because of shelf life when you freeze dry things even at home in these home freeze dryers the shelf life is anywhere from 15 to 25 years long right versus a dehydrator it's a year or less right especially in a humid climate like we have it just seems like the like the dehydrator just never really gets them really really dry in fact when you look at some of the kind of science behind it they say even the best dehydrators get things that they only take out about 70 of the water so they leave about 30 percent of the moisture still in the food where a freeze dryer takes out 99 of the moisture which is why it makes it last so much longer the other thing that is really important about freeze drying is that it maintains like all of the nutrients whereas with dehydrating it retains about 60 of the nutrients and through the cooking process of canning you lose even more right so when you think about that i mean that's a big deal with dehydrating you lose 40 of your nutrition right up front so that's i mean that's a big deal when you're trying to you know put away things for for the future or maybe put things away for a rainy day and you want good nutritious food when you open it back up 40 of your nutrition is gone right off the bat with dehydrating uh that really shocked me when we originally learned that right now whenever we talk about freeze drying versus dehydrating one thing that comes up over and over again is a lot of people for some reason assume that freeze drying must use just a ton of electricity we actually did an entire video on this subject if you want to go watch that but i'll kind of spill the beans here today we ran the freeze dryer we did a batch of things that took 24 hours and we also did the same thing in the in the dehydrator for 24 hours it costs a dollar 40 to run the freeze dryer for 24 hours and it costs a dollar 17 to run the dehydrator for the same amount of time so 23 cents difference i don't consider that a big deal um and really for the benefits that you're getting out of freeze drying it really ended up being a much better deal to run the freeze dryer than it did running the dehydrator and i would have never thought that it was so inexpensive to run a freeze dryer right i had no idea i was shocked at how inexpensive it was right because to be honest before we got one we just assumed because like everybody else right that it would have been that it uses a ton of power because you've got the freeze dryer itself you've got the vacuum pump you just it seems like a lot of equipment um but none of it uses all that much power to run right so enough talking about all of this we're going to grab the veggies that we got from the grocery store we're going to put them on the trays load up the freeze dryer and get it going and then after these vegetables are freeze-dried we're actually going to bring them back in the house most of them we're going to package up but we're actually going to make supper tomorrow night out of the freeze dried vegetables so you guys can see how to actually use them in a meal as well so these are the vegetables that our local store had on sale this week for 79 cents a bag it's 12 ounces of mixed vegetables and then we also have a couple bags of just peas because i wanted to try those as snacks so there's 12 ounces of vegetables in each bag i think we're gonna be able to fit two bags per tray and uh again so we'll fit 24 ounces per tray we don't really know yet how many ounces of freeze-dried veggies these are going to make because obviously they'll weigh a lot less because they won't have any moisture in them right what we do know is that the freeze-dried mixed veggies online are really pretty expensive right yeah on amazon i looked up and they are selling for about between two dollars and forty cents and two dollars and fifty cents an ounce for freeze-dried so obviously these aren't gonna weigh 24 ounces when we're done so when we're done we're actually gonna weigh them and then we'll figure out how much this cost us and how much it would have cost us to buy that many online right so we're gonna pour these on the trays and then we're gonna head out to the freeze dryer all right let's take these out to the freeze dryer all right so here's our freeze dryer we have the medium sized harvest right freeze dryer this holds four trays and then we have the premier oil pump they also sell an oilless pump but it's quite an upgrade so we have the oil pump uh this is the premier one though and you only have to do oil changes on it about every 30 batches so it's really not a big deal at all so the freeze dryer itself we're just to open up we're going to load these trays inside and i'm guessing for these mixed veggies it's going to take probably about 24 hours to freeze dry them that's one advantage of going to the store and buying pre-frozen vegetables is if you bring them right home and put them in the freeze dryer while they're already frozen or while they're still frozen you don't have to pre-freeze them in your freezer or in the freeze dryer they're already frozen so we'll shut that make sure it's made a good seal around the gasket here we'll hit the start button going to ask us if our food is frozen or not frozen we're going to say yes it's frozen and then it's going to start cooling down the system and after that it just takes over all on its own well it is the next afternoon we just took everything out of the freeze dryer and you guys look at how amazing this stuff looks it looks awesome it looks exactly the way it did when we put it in i think that is one of the really cool things about freeze drying is that it looks exactly the same when you take it out when we used to do a lot of dehydrating i mean things just looked a lot different when they were done than when they started but this stuff looks exactly the same yeah i want to try a couple of these because i'm just so so curious i already snuck some on the way in he did he ruined the fun i haven't tried any of them i haven't tried everything yet though i tried a lima bean i tried a piece of corn and a pea so i'm gonna try green beans basically you tried everything i'm gonna try green bean i'm gonna try the corn green beans are good carrots you guys it's amazing it's the taste is exactly as it is fresh the corn is really good i'm wishing it had a little salt on it though now that these are done before we eat it all we need to weigh it and we need to figure out how much this would have cost us had we purchased this freeze-dried food now again remember each bag was 12 ounces and there's two bags per tray to start with so there's 24 ounces of vegetables on each tray to start with so let's weigh it and see how much it is now so we're gonna put the entire tray hopefully in one bowl most of your stuff most of yours is going all over the counter [Music] all right so 24 ounces turned into four and a half ounces of finished product so if we take our calculator and we figure out what did we say 2.45 cents about per ounce on amazon so 245 times four point five so this bowl right here full of freeze-dried veggies would it cost us about eleven dollars on amazon at two dollars and forty-five cents an ounce but we bought the two bags for 79 cents each or so say 80 cents each so we spent 1.60 on this amount of freeze-dried food right but now remember we need to add in our electric costs which is about a dollar 40 per batch which would be all four trays so if we take this one tray that's about 35 cents so we'll add 35 cents to this so along with the electric cost we've got about 1.95 and then by the time we package it we're going to put these in mylar bags these mylar bags are about 50 cents and the oxygen absorbers are about 35 cents so we're looking about another 85 cents there so we're looking at about about 2.75 total for everything the to to make this batch so 2.75 versus 11 that's quite a difference i really think that it makes it worth doing this at home now a lot of times when we do these kind of figures especially for freeze dryer videos people say well it doesn't take into consideration the cost of the freeze dryer and while that's true i just want to kind of bring up that when you're making meals at home from scratch and you're figuring out how much money you're saving by by making that by making that food at home versus going out to eat nobody's ever building in the cost of your oven or your microwave or your grill or the propane or anything so i mean we need to do comparisons fairly right and i agree that yes there is quite an initial upfront investment in a freeze dryer but that's exactly what it is it's an investment and over time you will pay that investment down so we're looking at just the actual cost of the food that we're making today now we do need to package all of these uh because three of these are going to be for long-term storage but one of them the one that we just weighed we're going to use that we're going to eat it plus we're going to use it in our recipe today so the the first tray we're just going to put into a jar this is not going to last long we're going to eat this up and use it in today's dinner right the other three trays we're gonna put in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers and we're gonna seal it with the sealer that came with our freeze dryer okay you guys we are gonna try out our freeze-dried mixed veggies by creating a drop biscuit turkey pot pie it's so easy and delicious let's get started for this dinner we are going to be using a cast iron skillet for the entire meal we're going to start off on the stove top and then we're going to finish it right in the oven cast iron is perfect for this kind of meal so we're going to start off by sauteing some onions and we're going to use a couple tablespoons of fat you can use butter i'm using home rendered lard from our pigs two tablespoons is what we want to use we're not just going to use that to fry the onions then we're going to be adding some flour to make a roux which will ultimately thicken our sauce so we're going to melt that in our pan once it's melted we'll add in our onions our fat has melted i'm gonna go ahead and add one onion that has been diced up now i am cooking this on a medium heat we're just gonna saute these onions [Music] not until they're brown but until they're translucent [Music] in this recipe i'm gonna be using two pint jars of our canned turkey from thanksgiving inside of here is some nice broth so i'm going to be straining out the broth separating the broth from the turkey and we'll be using both the broth and the turkey meat in this recipe just recently i did a video teaching how to can cooked turkey or really cooked meat make sure you check that out if you're wanting to learn about that i'm just going to be using a simple strainer to strain out the broth we'll come back to these in a little bit but i think it's time for us to move on over here by the sauteed onions looks like they're nice and translucent and the edges are starting to brown a little bit so they're ready to move on i'm going to add to this one quarter cup of flour and we're going to stir that around in the fat and it's going to make kind of like a paste ultimately it's this flower paste mixed with the fat that's going to thicken our sauce that's going to be in the pot pie now we don't want to rush this process we want this to cook a little bit maybe brown a little bit if we can let this cook for you know just a couple minutes it'll kind of make that flowery taste kind of disappear into that sauce if you go too fast your sauce can taste a little bit like flour plus if it browns a little bit it's going to get it's going to give a lot more flavor to our sauce [Music] when i strained the broth out of the turkey i got about one and a half cups of the broth i want three total cups of liquid so i'm going to go ahead and put the one and a half cups of broth in here and then i'm going to quickly add one and a half cups of milk actually our milk is pretty much half and half because our cow produces so much butter fat and if you can use half and half instead of just milk it's going to make all the difference and make this recipe just fantastic okay so i'm going to just quickly do these things here add that and a cup and a half of milk or half and half i am going to keep stirring this and i have this on about a medium heat i'm going to bring this up to a gentle boil so that it gets nice and thick this will make fantastic sauce for our pot pie well our sauce has come to a boil already it's looking pretty great should thicken up a little bit more i'm going to go ahead and turn this down to low we're going to let this simmer for 10 minutes but right now is when i'm going to add the freeze-dried veggies so that they have more time than just the cooking time to rehydrate i'm going to shake them up a little because it looked like the corn had settled a little bit just because the pieces are so little okay i'm adding one and three quarters cups of the freeze-dried veggies just going to stir those in so we're going to let this simmer for 10 minutes okay i'm gonna go ahead and add the final things that we need in here i'm gonna add two pints of the turkey i'm also going to add some seasonings now because we aren't using store-bought broth or store-bought meat there's very little salt in everything that we've made here so i'm going to add one teaspoon of salt this is pink himalayan salt all of these seasonings i actually buy in bulk from azure standard i'm going to add half of a teaspoon of black pepper and one teaspoon of dried parsley i actually just got this parsley and i ordered a pound of it and i didn't realize how much a pound of parsley is like what quantity this is only a third of it so guys i'm gonna have dried parsley probably for the rest of my life especially because you know you use a teaspoon here and there okay let's go ahead and mix all of this up and then it's just gonna sit here until we are ready to put our drop biscuits on top that is what we're gonna be working on next the drop biscuits also now that we're to that point we're going to preheat the oven to 425 okay moving on to drop biscuits i love to make drop biscuits because they are super easy i rarely roll out biscuits because drop is drop biscuits are just so much easier i guess and a lot less stressful to get perfect okay we're going to start off with two cups of flour we're gonna put all of our dry ingredients in here first one tablespoon of baking powder now because missouri is quite often very humid my baking powder kind of gets clumpy so i always sift it into my baked goods so that somebody doesn't end up with a giant clump of baking powder or baking soda in whatever it is that i'm baking so i just sift it make sure there aren't any clumps we're also going to add half of a teaspoon of salt again i'm using pink himalayan salt we're just going to mix that up really briefly okay the next ingredient is some type of fat i am going to be using the home rendered pig lard again from our own pigs we're going to be putting in one third of a cup of lard i have done this same recipe using butter you can use shortening but we really enjoy these drop biscuits using our home rendered lard okay now we're going to mix in the fat with our flour mixture and make sure to get all of that out of there now i forgot to say i've also used this recipe with coconut oil but it has to be a solid fat that you're working with i'm going to be using a pastry cutter to blend in the fat to the flour we're basically wanting this to turn into coarse crumbs that is mixed up as much as it needs to be there are no big clumps of fat so we're done with that we just need to add our milk now again our milk is more like half and half you can use milk i'm gonna use this if you have half and half it'll make these even more wonderful so we're going to add one cup of milk that in and then we're really just going to work this as little as possible just to wet the ingredients now this is going to be a lot stickier dough than if you are used to making roll out biscuits drop biscuits are a nice alternative the biscuits are all set let's go put them on our pot pie so we're just going to drop these biscuits by kind of a big tablespoon full just right on top of these well it's just as easy as that now they just go in the oven these need to bake for about 18 to 20 minutes i'm gonna go ahead and set the timer and we'll be back at a jiffy to try this pot pie the pot pie is finished let's take it out of the oven so you can see how just beautiful it turned out now it did take quite a bit longer than 18 minutes to get done i'd say it's been about 25 minutes so let's see what it looks like how beautiful is that you guys it's gorgeous it smells amazing but it is so hot we need to let this cool down before we can taste it i know it's going to be amazing what we really want to try are those freeze-dried veggies that are mixed in there they look fantastic everything does so let's just wait a little bit so we don't burn our mouths off and come back and have a taste all right this has been cooling off and i've been smelling it from the other room it smells awesome so we're not gonna wait any longer we're gonna give it a try now mainly again we're trying to concentrate we've made this recipe a lot of times with fresh or frozen vegetables so we we know the recipe is good what we're trying to see is how did the freeze-dried veggies work in this recipe so i'm going to try some green beans because in my experience with other things that we've made green beans are one of the harder things to get rehydrated correctly they kind of end up a little on the rubbery side so let's try it okay and i have green beans also they're really nice they are they're really nice and soft and they're not rubbery at all no they're not no that's actually really good i think because you cook it for so long you let it simmer in the pot and then you let it simmer in the oven i think that was the perfect amount of time to get them rehydrated i'm going to try some carrots they're good too i just tried the corn the carrots and the lima beans they're all very good yeah i think it's fantastic right you guys this is awesome because now we can just have you know a candle that's sitting around put it in our recipes and it'll be perfect you know when we originally were talking about getting a freeze dryer one of the things we're excited about is being able to have stuff like this just kind of on the shelf ready to grab and you know be able to throw together quick meals and really this i think accomplishes that like this is exactly what we were going for right if you guys are wanting to know more about the harvest right freeze dryers make sure that you check out the link to that company in the description of this video the one that we have that we use is the medium freeze dryer and we have the the we have the premier oil pump so if you want to look at those specifically go ahead and check those out you guys we hope that you enjoyed coming along on this process with us we get lots of questions not only about how to freeze dry but how do you use the freeze dried stuff and how do you just incorporate that into your meals we're so glad that we were able to show you how we are starting to incorporate the freeze-dried food into our meals if you're enjoying our channel and the content that we put out i hope that you'll hit the subscribe button before you leave don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and remember as always the absolute best way that you can help us is by sharing our videos on all of your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 151,342

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: qPMvazqxgIg

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021