Canning Room Heaven | Tips on Preserving Food

also got honey we've got herbs and we've got everything in here the eggs over the top there's duck eggs and chicken eggs raw freeze-dried so with those we just crack them into a giant Bowl scramble them up and and pour it into the freeze dryer and then it comes out like a crystally looking powder it's sparkly like glitter but when you add water to it the like the whole texture of the scrambled egg comes back wow you can't freeze dry whole eggs because the egg white kind of basically just floats away into it becomes so like interesting it's not like dense enough yeah it doesn't I don't know where you have to make it work right and then The Scrambled ones it it freeze-dried them and then they they come out better than if they are really cooked how do you know how much water to add um I Google it there's a there's a ratio there's a ratio I think we wrote it on the top of the jars because we looked it up when we first did it and it's it's like a like it tells you how to how much to put like a tablespoon of powder and so much water makes an egg so and when we did these we wrote down how many eggs approximately were in each jar on the freeze drying there's a little bit more math involved for oh yes but like four onions yeah it's I'm like so if we wanted if we wanted to use this whole jar of onions which we probably wouldn't hey don't do that buddy um we take the lid off take the there's a little oxygen absorber in there too so we'll take that off the top and then we pour boiling water into the jar and let it sit and Let Them Sit probably 15 minutes and then then we strain it out and you cook the food and that works so these are sweet potatoes exactly onions is in there they're true to size so yeah they say about the same two tops maybe that's probably two or three two or three yeah okay it depends on how big you're in it or two but the nice thing about onions is that like this is a partial jar and I didn't have to reseal that or anything I just put the lid back on and they don't go bad like because it's freeze-dried well because it's freeze-dried but also because it's onions now something like tomatoes like if I open this jar of tomato slices those are freeze-dried um yeah from last year and if I open that jar and expose them to the the moisture that's in the air right they will get Squishy and gummy pretty quickly but they those you know you can eat them for a meal and but you couldn't just put the lid back on and call it good same thing with the eggs you have to reseal those so you freeze dry it and put it in that jar with an oxygen absorber there's nothing else there's one here and that oxygen absorber pulls out any remaining oxygen moisture and then that's it and the other thing we do with some of them in our what are you doing dude um we have a vacuum sealer attachment to our FoodSaver so like you put this there's a hose that comes out of FoodSaver and you plug it into this and it pulls the air yeah and it sucks all the air out so if you do that and an oxygen absorber it's a lot better for long term goddess storage but if we're just doing like we're gonna eat this over the winter I'm gonna do one or the other got it but if you want long term like 10 years with well if you really want long term yeah you don't put them in glass because you're exposing them to light so the uh the really long term are in the mylar bags got it with the oxygen absorber okay and that's supposed to be better for a paper sealed five gallon bucket like a bucket like that maybe would work too yeah lots of people they make mylar bags that fit into those buckets too so you can seal it and then put it in and it's extra fancy yeah we've got that's all honey this is finger bees knees there's a big section of honey in here taking up my tomatoes this is The Dark One yeah and that's more cloverish Clover versus flowers early spring okay sometimes we get if you get a sale on something like uh we came across a whole bunch of organic lemons mmm snatched them up and she freeze dried I got them for free in limes this is lime juice so you Juiced them well this is I didn't freeze dry them sorry yeah we juice the limes and lemons zest right I did it is freeze-dried lemon zest wow it's magical wow it was a lot of organic lemons to make that and then we also have one of lime zest that's free interesting so a freeze dryer is a pretty and wonderful and like lots of people really worry about opening and that that squash and a few other things but like our Peppers things that are herbs that you'd usually use more like that are dryer anyway onions the peppers the celery and the herbs yeah these are freeze-dried um parsley basil Dill all that which tastes like fresh they're amazing but you can open the jar use what you need close the jar as long as you seal it back up it keeps the same way a regular dry dirt wow when I make them as a chicken broth we'll put it on the stove I'll get a little bit of the freeze-dried basil and oregano and just drop just the tiniest bit into the broth to make soup and it is wow and so what's the difference between the like a dried herb and then the freeze dried there's a you notice the difference in the quality when you take food out of the freeze dryer you find just the the shell of the food with no moisture around it left on your trays where you put it in the chamber of the freeze dryer is covered in ice and it's basically pure water so when that ice melts and you drain it out sometimes it'll have a little bit of a smell of the food it came out from but for the most part it is completely yeah smell this right when you when you dehydrate you're actually losing some of these oils yeah you're losing the things that the actual flavor yeah and nutrients you're losing nutrients yeah because like see how can you see how green that is that is this is freeze-dried parsley but like if you dry parsley yeah it's the same colors when you harvested it yeah it loses color I have some in here I'm sure that's not it's actually correct yes you know ounce rounds it's way more flavorful grab a jar of strawberries these when we did vacuum seal these so if you hear it oh well try one oh my gosh oh whoa whoa the flavor the dehydrated one you're going to lose a lot of that flavor and it's gonna be harder too and like I mean that is so I mean who needs to buy candy when you got this I think so for people who are trying to decide because free dryers aren't cheap they're a couple Grand aren't they at least at least like a few grams and we've got it's probably closer to 3 500 yeah so it's a big investment it's a big investment but I mean man it has completely changed the way we do things in here the water pressure can okay green beans same varieties of beans freeze-dried oh my gosh they they look because this is this like washed out color is this purple and white and it those are pre-cooked and ready to go but what we do with these is we pour the boiling water in the jar let it um let it sit sometimes we have to dump it and try and add more if it cools off too fast and then drain it out and we fry them like stir fry hook cook them you can steam them you can do whatever but they taste like fresh yeah what happens it's just if you get them the right amount the texture is just like the fresh if you don't quite get them hydrated enough it tastes more like a thawed frozen meat like with those kind of like a little bit tougher whereas these detectors Never Gonna Be texture is Never Gonna it's always better basically yeah and I don't like those you grew up on them and like some I'm like they're gross then they just it takes away all the flavors they even when the texture is not quite right because you can't get the moisture right second favorite here which this we just discovered last year this is zucchini and yellow summer squash and if you freeze these and try to cook them right I do complete mush right they don't work and we don't have to blanch these either or the beans because if you freeze beans you have to blanch them right yeah you don't have to but these like we can do the same thing as long as you hydrate them with hot water and drain it and then we stir fry them with the beans and stuff and like the texture is just a little different but it's the flavor of Summer and the nutritional value is still there that's that's what I'm noticing because color and flavor is an indication of nutrition and freeze-dried food keeps more nutritional value than any other shelf stable preservation method so this one this is um beef broth freeze bread freeze-dried beef broth so another thing you would have to pressure can that you don't have to brush your can if you have a freeze dryer and you just take out what you need you can make it as strong as you want to butter it down and it's got all the the gelatin and right we didn't skim off any fat on this because when you're pressure canning broth you have to skim off the fat so you lose all that oh my gosh when you're freeze drying it you just have to make sure it's really well Incorporated because if the fat is separated it kind of causes some craziness in the freezer I have some of them probably at least and it's so you can make it like super concentrated make like um what's called a bouillon or the um that you know things you can buy turkey broth yeah chicken and all sorts of stuff yeah Venison and then this one is goat milk oh dehydrated milk is done powdered milk powdered milk which does not taste very good like that that's what it tastes like lots of people say freezing goat milk does the same thing so I assume it's something to do with that doesn't taste like it is fresh but it's still nice to have like it's good we're not gonna drink it and you can't really make cheese out of it we tried that it didn't it did not taste good either but we saved it this year we were saving that because we were afraid we were gonna have bottle babies or puppies or something like that that we might need to supplement that's a good use it for that that's smart you can use it in baking and then you don't notice the goaty flavor but we just have a little bit because we don't have that much extra but we will be trying that with the cow milk and try to see if fix the flavor issues whenever we really need to be preserving it because lots of people do it but yeah since freeze drying is just removing all the liquid not the liquid the water yeah it didn't remove the liquid it removes the water just H2O so when you go to rehydrate your food depending on what it is you don't have to rehydrate it with water so imagine um rehydrating that zucchini with chicken broth yeah uh or something else yeah you can you can do it freeze-dried meat you can freeze dry meat so you take a marinade solution yeah Worcestershire sauce [Music] whatever very interesting it opens up a lot of doors so my only maybe the only so besides the initial cost how much power does that thing pull it uses a decent amount of power so we have pretty cheap electric here yeah um but I can tell you on ours we've estimated that the average batch costs between two and six dollars depending on how long of a batch it is case of peaches was from one load one thing and then there was more this isn't all of it like we ate some of them yeah and we put some of them in mylar bags because the peaches don't shrink but you know what I would challenge I challenge people when they say it's so expensive to run okay well if you're water bathing you're boiling water on your stove or on a propane so you're using electricity you're using natural gas or using propane um the other thing you can do when you're using jars these are all flats that have already been used these are not new Flats the lids the lids so you don't have to use new ones every time those things aren't expensive or aren't cheap excuse me so once you pop one that you've used on maybe your green beans or your tomato sauce we save them you technically aren't supposed to reuse those in Canning but you can reuse them on your freeze-dried food so if we keep the rims on all the freeze-dried food to make sure that that stays yes because when you're on the canned item there's no rims on them because you don't want that falseal yes yeah so people do that so that they know it's really sealed but with these like even when we vacuum seal them sometimes they fail and it's not worth losing your food because it doesn't matter if this isn't sealed it matters that the lid is on because it's a freeze-dried product so it's not it's shelf stable whether it's open or closed and if they if they come you know the lid popped off completely it would be ruined the only other thing I would mention about this room is that we're clearly not in a basement lots of people think they can't do this unless they have a basement or a Cellar and like we've been using this room for this purpose for what five years okay and the food doesn't go bad it's a little warm for it in the summer it's I've got a thermometer right here it says it's 76 so it's about as hot as it gets in here and in the winter it gets like cold enough that sometimes we have to run a space heater because we don't want anything to freeze and if it's like below zero outside right we'll have things on the floor that will break so we hope we have to keep the food about floor the floor runs around yeah you have to have a Cellar you have to have a basement anybody can start preserving food darkness is more important by far or for canned foods if now you want to keep these pumpkins here all winter like they would do a lot better in 50 degrees and like or or fresh potatoes potatoes this room runs a little bit warmer than the rest of our house which is why are potatoes onions are in our dining room that's right by the thermostat it stays cooler and yeah in a Suburban home or anything and there's a little garden if you think you can't preserve food because you don't have a place to store it if you want to try to preserve it for you know a decade well maybe but if you're preserving it to have fresh food healthy food to eat over the winter before it yeah yeah guys don't let that be an excuse yeah people look at this a lot of times how long is this going to last you and I'm like hopefully about 10 months like we don't want it to last longer than that I mean the food we put in the jar is we want to eat it all in the the year and then put it back new food and the next year and then sometimes like we won't have as good of a harvest to something and it's nice to have like we always have a little extra tomato sauce because I don't want to run out of that so we and we'll use that first even after we start putting up new tomatoes in meal prep in the winter it'll come in and I'm gonna do sweet potatoes some onions some squash and some green beans take all four of these hydrate them strain them and put a little put a little lard or olive oil or whatever in the uh Skillet and easy it's yeah but to get through spring when we're so busy planting and we need something fast we need it we come in we're exhausted and you want a healthy meal you know rehydrated you don't have to spend all that time chopping yeah smart I like that and when you're making soup the other thing when you're making like soup you take the zucchini or green beans whatever you're putting in your soup you don't even have to rehydrate it you just dump it in and it's because it's already made in the broth [Music] pre-chopped sweet pepper is already from last last September and I just dump them in there peppers and onions I don't rehydrate them I'll mix them into the meat one or the raw meat and it's going to rehydrate with the juices that are in there because it Cooks yummy that is cool yeah we uh freeze-dried chili and like other pre-cooked so we have some like chicken curry that I made yeah like you can just put the whole super pre-made whatever we have some Veggie beef stew that we freeze dried and then you take it out you put it in your bowl and you pour your hot water in let it you have to let it hydrate beans take a while so the chili can take longer to rehydrate I really think we need to start doing it like overnight or something yeah because they take a long time you gotta pre-soak them for a while but it's like it's worth it yeah have the food yeah we make big meals with a big family and right we get too much as long as I've got a tray full a freeze dryer tray which is hmm this is the size of the tray yeah as long as I've got enough to fill this tray then leftovers can just go in the freeze dryer and so even a liquid like a broth yeah it's like a bunch of liquid on there and yeah and you scrape it off and then yeah okay liquid this holds just over actually the broth

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 93,699

Keywords: home canning, canning, food storage, how to store food long term, freeze drying food at home, homesteading for beginners, homesteading canning and preserving, preserving food, how to preserve food, canning room, canning storage room, food preserving methods, food preserving techniques, gooseberry bridge farm, nature's always right, homestead canning and preserving food, how to freeze dry food at home, freeze drying food

Id: 5QSXlvJZ3eI

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023