Dehydrating and Freeze Drying Eggs for Long Term Storage

welcome to rosewood homestead today's video is both fun and very very important we are going to talk about how to safely dry eggs for long-term storage so we'll get to that in just a moment [Music] um i ran an experiment i'm always experimenting yesterday and these are actually six eggs that i dehydrated in our regular dehydrator yesterday i have not yet powdered them they just come out in these beautiful little flakes you can dehydrate eggs two ways you can scramble them first and then dehydrate the scrambled bits and that is really yucky my opinion um the other way to do it is to is what we're going to demonstrate today which is breaking them into the container of a blender and then we're going to blend them up a little bit and then put them in these little trays that came with my dehydrator if your dehydrator does not have trays like this you may have to improvise using plastic wrap or something lining your trays in order to be able to do that so let me tell you what i do before i ever dehydrate anything and that includes eggs i think about how i want to use them after the fact when they are powdered like this how am i going to be using them well for the most part i'm going to be making scrambled eggs or omelettes for breakfast or i'm going to be adding them to baked goods cakes and pancakes and waffles scones which is something i'm working on right now a whole new set of recipes and so i want those eggs to rehydrate in a raw state and it is very important then that we pay careful attention to the temperature at which we are going to be dehydrating now an egg once it gets up to about 140 after it's out of the shell then the there are some proteins in the albumin which is the white part of the egg that start to coagulate at 140. we don't want that to happen we want to keep it in its raw state and so be sure when you set your dehydrator that you set it to 140 or below 138 if you can set it that low mine goes in increments of about nine degrees so i dehydrated these at about 140 and it took about a piece of them are still in there the middle these aren't completely flat and so it was thicker right here in the middle and so i just had to lift this part out and it's back over in the dehydrator on a little plastic lid in the dehydrator so that it can finish dehydrating so i'm very very excited about the fact that you can indeed dehydrate raw eggs and make them safe in order to store long-term but in starting the process of really calculating about how many eggs i'm going to need in a year i'm way behind on powdering eggs and so i really need to get started on that and a year's worth of home dehydrated or freeze-dried eggs a year is about all we want to count on professionally canned ones can last up to about 10 years we can't mimic what their processes are so the eggs that we do at home will be good for a year or two and that's that's plenty long because we can rotate through those and keep replenishing them i'm sure you all remember my saying a number of times that when we do pressure canning we need to know our enemy and with pressure canning our big enemy is botulism well with doing eggs especially since we are going to try to dehydrate them raw we need to know our enemy and that is salmonella and so we will be talking about salmonella once we get these all processed and i will go through the steps that we need to do to ensure that once the eggs are in the powder and we start using them the precautions that we need to take to be sure that salmonella doesn't rear its ugly head and get us so we'll talk about that a little bit later so in this blender now i have seven eggs and my tray yesterday i put six eggs on it and i learned that i can do a little bit more so i'm putting eight eggs per tray so i'm just going to use the pulse here for a second i'm actually just going to pulse it off and on and you can see about how much i do just a quick just one quick little flip second one three four and that is blended enough for me now if you like them all one consistency then by all means go right ahead and do it how you like now it one way that i could do this was this is how this fits in my dehydrator i have three of these little trays and they don't fit by themselves they have to go on top of another tray and you can see that they're not quite level so i could pour the eggs right here and then try to walk across and put this into the dehydrator but i'm not going to do that i will spill it for sure so we're going to go over to the dehydrator and i will fill these three trays so i'll meet you over there in just a minute this is our dehydrator it is a magic mill it's an old one these are plastic but they've done fine for us and we're not going to get a new one so i'm going to pull the tray out and then i'm going to pull this tray out a little bit more and just pour right in the middle here and i don't want this to be too thick so this is eight eggs [Music] and it just fills that tray perfectly so i'm going to slide the white tray back onto the regular tray carefully and then slowly put it inside and i'm going to do the same thing with these two now i will show you the leftovers from yesterday's experiment the edges are now getting dry but it's still not dry in the middle so this is just a plastic lid and i'm just putting it right there okay so i'm going to finish this up and then i'll meet you back over at the regular place the dehydrator is set for 12 hours so we'll see how they are after 12 hours this morning at 4am i was up doing the very same thing with the blender only this time i would put 18 eggs in here do the same thing and i poured them into four of our freeze dryer trays and then i put these outside in our regular freezer so they have now been freezing for 12 hours they're frozen solid and we just checked the freeze dryer it's ready to go and we got the eggs out of the regular freezer and they're ready to put in so let's go out and get those going too the temperature inside kelvin is now 15 degrees fahrenheit it says this freezer dryer is working correctly the refrigeration condenser may turn on and off until you load the food and press continue then in big letters load food into freeze dryer close drain valves so that's what we're going to do so i can open it up now because um there's no vacuum and um it's cold in there here is our tray of frozen eggs and so i'm going to slip that right in here load all four in [Music] put the insulating pad in place close the door then i have to close the drain valve needs to be able to form a vacuum and so that has to be closed and now i'm ready to continue it's going to get way noisy when i hit continue so this will take about 24 hours maybe more to do and so we will come back tomorrow when both the dehydrator and the freeze dryer are finished and then we'll show you what comes next in terms of drying and powdering eggs for long-term storage so we'll see you tomorrow good morning it is a gorgeous fall morning here on the colorado plateau and my favorite cameraman is standing right there what could be better so we are going to just do a quick check in on our dehydrated eggs here are the three trays that we put in yesterday they were they've been processing for 13 hours as you can see they're really dry around the edges but not so much right here so it's the same thing this is my trial run and these eventually did get dry so we'll be adding those to what we powder in a little while but for right now because these are all done on the edge i don't want these to process anymore so i'm just going to pick up the edges put them in this pan and then i'm going to um leave the centers in place and we'll put those back in the dehydrator probably for another couple of hours these process so far for 13 hours and um i imagine yep it'll be at least two or three hours before those will be done as well i went outside this morning i've been out several times checking the eggs in the freeze dryer and i'm happy to report that they are now after 17 hours on the final dry and so they're probably about five hours maybe a little bit more away from being finished out there too so i'll bring you back after i've i have prepared these to go back into the dehydrator so here they are ready to go back into the dehydrator with just the middles um if your trays are completely flat you won't have this problem but you know we work with what we have and so i'm going to be putting these back in the dehydrator um this is the amount that we got from off the trays that are already dried or apparently dry i'm going to go ahead and add our test case to this and it is going to be really important that this egg powder is completely dry um because we do want to stave off botulism as well and i'm going to get into all of that after we come back and are ready to make the powders so we will see you when everything is all finished and we're ready to powder it up good morning the freeze dryer finished after dark last night 27 hours to do these eggs and i checked my log book and that's exactly how many hours it took the first time we did freeze-dried eggs this is the pan of dehydrated eggs the last little middle sections took about 15 hours to do so our next step would be to powder these eggs and then we're going to rehydrate them i'm going to vacuum seal and drop in an oxygen absorber and then we're going to talk about salmonella and botulism so here we go we're going to start with these eggs these are the dehydrated eggs so we'll put a couple of scoops in [Applause] i usually put a plastic thing right there and i forgot so i'm just going to go ahead [Music] one of the things that i want to be sure of is that these eggs are very very powdered so i am going to go ahead and just put them through this strainer to strain out anything that um needs to be rerun so that was a little bit of a challenge to get those powdered you may have a better way of powdering them than i do i finally ended up taking this little piece off turning this container on while it was empty get the blade going really fast and then pouring in through this hole and it seemed to do a lot better you can see some pretty interesting layering here that's the difference between the albumen the white and the yolk i wanted to see how easily these turn in the jar that's one indication of dryness we need to be sure that these eggs are completely dry to in order to present prevent botulism now one of the things that i'm going to do um i'm going to show you how to rehydrate these um there are lots of different opinions on how much uh egg powder constitutes one egg um i looked at a lot of the professionally canned ones in the number ten cans and they pretty much say two tablespoons so i have four tablespoons right here a fourth of a cup and um then i do a one to one so i'm going to put in a fourth of a cup of warm water and i'm going to stir that around a little bit it should look eggy so we'll see i'm going to set this aside and for right now i'm just going to put the lid on we will end up vacuum sealed these in a few minutes now the freeze-dried eggs should go much easier these are just as light as air they're wafer-like they're completely dried i don't have any concerns at all that these aren't completely dry and so i won't need to put them back in the oven had these not rotated the way they did if they were sticky now remember there's a little bit of fat in eggs with a yolk so then i would have put the powder back in the oven or back in the dehydrator to give it a little bit more drying time and these just crumble in my hands so um it's very easy to powder these i'll show you one batch and then we'll finish off camera these are also a lighter color now we put our freeze-dried things in two-quart jars it just is more convenient for us we have a little bit of egg powder everywhere we'll have to clean that up later but everything is powdered and um so this is two and a half dozen i added my experiment uh half dozen eggs to this as well this is six dozen eggs so we have eight and a half dozen eggs right here one of the things that i am noticing with this is this is not eggy i think that this is going to need a little bit more water so i'm going to put some more water in in just a minute but first we're going to get our quarter of a cup of this egg powder this egg powder is much more fluffy that is because the cell walls are not ruined so i'm putting the warm water now in the freeze-dried eggs in a bowl this spoon stir them around a little bit and let them rehydrate and i'm going to add just a little bit more water to probably another two tablespoons of water over here and while these rehydrate i want to talk about a couple of things and then jim and i will use these for our breakfast eggs this morning this is the first time i have rehydrated dehydrated eggs rather than freeze-dried eggs okay so the temperature of the processing the drying out both in the freeze dryer and in the dehydrator never got over 150 degrees uh the freeze dryer got up to 120 and these i processed at about thirty nine hundred and forty um salmonella is not killed until you reach the high 150s or most people just say about 160 and so it is imperative that we cook these eggs we can do that by scrambling them which i'm going to do in just a moment here adding them to pancakes or cakes or baking of any kind so long as they are cooked we cannot use these just pretend that these are raw eggs which essentially they are they're just powdered all right so now the thing that i want to do is show you how i um preserve these especially for long-term storage now i've been doing quite a bit of reading on this and um the commercial preparers of egg powder put in an oxygen absorber and they vacuum seal now an oxygen absorber pulls out only the oxygen it does not pull out the air nitrogen is left in there vacuum sealing pulls out the air is 100 of the oxygen gone or 100 of the air gone no not really we don't have that strong of equipment that we can use in our homes but most of it is gone now what we do not want to create is a an environment for botulism eggs are low acid and so if there's moisture in the eggs and we pull all the oxygen out or most of the oxygen out that is creating an environment for botulism so i'm not worried at all about these these are completely dried the water is all pulled out of these these on the other hand i did in my dehydrator so is it possible that there's moisture in here sure there is but because of the the way that they are turning in this jar i think most of the moisture is gone i think that these will be safe um so we're going to be adding a um oxygen absorber and then i'm going to vacuum seal this is a brand new vacuum sealer for us we're not going to talk much about it this time for right now we're just going to vacuum seal these and i am going to put an oxygen absorber in each one and we need to do this quickly and i am using used lids these have been previously used for canning on these jars and i will re-vacuum seal these oxygen absorbers as well okay now i want to vacuum seal these and so um with this new little with our new vacuum sealer it is really quite powerful accessory there was a lot of air in there which is oh i should have waited until after it dinged i'm still getting used to this all right this is very much sealed so this ring is going on and now this is shelf stable these will be shelf stable for two to five years they will not last that long for us we rotate through these i am using these all the time so i'm going to finish doing these okay these need a little bit more time to dehydrate but we're going to go ahead and close out the video anyway these very much look like eggs they're slimy the way eggs are these do a little bit these are more thick so i am going to scramble these up really quickly and i'm going to do it in two separate batches and then i'm going to bring the plates over so you can compare the difference and i will be right back all right they both did great um cooks just like regular eggs these are the freeze-dried and these are the dehydrated so i'm going to take just a little bite of both what i'm going to be checking for besides taste is whether or not they are grainy not one bit if i did not know that elves had been freeze-dried reconstituted and scrambled i never would have known tastes exactly like fresh this is a dehydrated not grainy one bit not at all i had read some people said that dehydrated and then powdered are grainy not one bit i can't tell the difference between the two in taste or texture so that's great this is a fabulous food to have on our long-term storage shelves and it as it will last whether we have a dehydrator or a freeze dryer here we have a very successful experience in dehydrating and freeze-drying eggs for long-term storage so i hope you're able to do this try it and i think you'll be very pleased thanks for joining us and we will see you at our next video [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead -- That "Woman with a Gadget"

Views: 361,387

Keywords:

Id: qfa1GvcohHM

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021