Dehydrating & Freeze Drying Carrots

foreign [Music] good morning and welcome to Rose Red Homestead we're so glad to have you back at our videos we appreciate you so very much we love our community just to keep you updated on what's going on right now we are running a class in water bath canning and you can join anytime it's an online class you can take as long as you like to finish it and there is a certificate at the end it's four lessons and I think 15 short videos to help you learn more about water bath canning we also have our new food storage book up in our bookstore and the link to register for the class the link to the bookstore are both below this video so we have a lot going plus I'm working on a book right now dry mixed meals in jars keep your fingers crossed I'm hoping by the end of August I'll have that one done it is returned to school time for us our K-12 students in this area are already back in school at our University City next week is the week of faculty meetings and preparations and then the following week we start with classes so here we go again it's fall time it's harvest time there's a lot going on as you know we focus on self-reliance food security and emergency preparedness and today we're going to do a little bit with food security with carrots and I have right here 15 pounds of carrots that I've peeled which is why my blouse is orange and my face probably looks like it has more freckles these were juicy carrots and they kept splashing so anyway I I thought I would wear orange so the splashes wouldn't hurt I'm going to be doing two things with carrots the thing that we need to remember whenever we process food is what is the end use going to be and with this we're going to both freeze dry and dehydrate the carrots because I want some for making powder for our instant vegetable soups I want some in little pieces that I can use for mirepoix which you've heard me talk about that before in other videos it is the mixture of carrots celery and onions that you saute as the foundation for a lot of really wonderful soups and stews and savory meals and and then I want some to use in soups and stews as an ingredient as well so we're going to be doing grated and we are going to be doing sliced now these slices came out a little bit weird there are lots of ways to get food prepared for the way that we need them to be I am going to try out today my anchorum mixer called the kitchen machine I did go ahead and buy the slicing and dicing whatever this is attachment and um I'm not ready to put it in our Amazon store yet I don't put things in our Amazon store that we have not personally purchased and used and like and so far I'm a little bit iffy on this so I think maybe today we'll tell the tale um because it turns out things like this and I think that's maybe a user problem and that would be me so I'm still getting used to it but you can grate these with a box grater or when any other mechanical means that you may have it does not have to be a setup like this but I do want to demonstrate this for you so what I have learned so far and we're going to start with the shreds now with carrots they need to be blanched for about four minutes now a lot of people skip that step I have skipped that step but what I have learned as I am getting more and more intense in our food preparation is that with vegetables when I blanch them the color stays better and they turn out better the end result is better so I'm pretty much going to blanch almost everything except I still don't blanch onions so we're going to blanch these little things and I have a pot of water going in my Cuisinart pot and this one I love and this one is up on the the um Amazon store what I have learned about this so far and I did a few little trial runs obviously is that I can't just put one carrot in and if it slides this way then what happens is the slices turn out like this and sometimes they are thicker and then it gets between this housing and the the blade wheel and it stops it just like that and that I find is very annoying so if I feel if I feel the compartment with carrots to where they can't wiggle off to the side Jim can you get in there can I tip it maybe a little bit yes that helps much better okay then it tends to work better but we'll see how this goes so I'm just going to turn this on [Music] so I find that quite annoying crazy that's it [Music] okay I'm gonna set up my KitchenAid My Good Old Faithful KitchenAid can do this just fine so I'm going to get that set up and we'll be back with Good Old Faithful here um I am not sure that that is the problem of the anchor shrim it might be my problem I have looked at several YouTube videos maybe I did not look close enough so I'm going to research it some more and keep trying it out so I'm not going to write it off yet but neither is it going up on our Amazon until I'm sure Meanwhile we're back to this one so this one works just great I've used this one or one like it for years and years and know that it's Dependable in this with this attachment so here we go wrong way okay so we have this much I'm now going to put this over in my pot over here and we'll blanch these for four minutes and then I'll show you what is next blanching is simply boiling the vegetables now when I put those in the water was boiling and now it is not so once it comes back to a boil I'm just going to time it for four minutes and then I'm going to dump them out on a towel and let them drain and then they will be ready to go in either freeze dryer trays or dehydrator trays we were blanching those I did another bowl of the shreds first we're going to bring these these have been kind of tilted and draining back into the pot so I'm going to bring them back over here now so that you can see and dumping them right here foreign and these are now ready to go on the trays [Music] all right I think that's done and here we go for some slices oh I'm just going to put them in they're going to come out Every Which Way but that's okay these turned out every which way and that's okay they will be eaten they will be used as soon as this batch is done I'll have another batch of the slices ready to go and we will come back when everything is laid out on the tray so that you can see it we will also blanch these four minutes just like we did the shreds so we'll see you shortly well here we are we have six trays for the dehydrator and four for the freeze dryer these are the coins I my fear is that they're going to dry in one big lump and freeze dry in one big lump and I won't be able to pull them apart but if if that happens I'll just break them in pieces or maybe use those for powdering so here's the upside and the downside to doing this I have previously just purchased them in number 10 cans I just checked the price on a number 10 can of carrots this is much more than a number 10 can it's 23 dollars so Jim has spent about just under fifteen dollars for 15 pounds of carrots and it would do easily two a little bit more than two number ten cans so you can balance the cost but this is very messy it's a messy job my feet are sticking to the floor carrots are sweet they have a lot of sugar in them and so I'm going to have to mop my floor as left my kitchen in quite a mess I usually don't make a big mess when I cook but this was especially messy for me so will I do it again you bet because I want to well I want to see how they turn out first I will be able to use them even if all I do is powder everything and I use a lot of carrot powder in the things that we do so this um this concludes the preparation part we will come back with the finished product we're going to put this in the dehydrator at 150 degrees it will probably take I'm guessing about 15 hours these will go into the freeze dryer and because I've not done carrots before I'm guessing it will be at least 24 hours so we will come back with the finished products so see you soon okay you're on you and the Roses let's see what the roses look like yeah okay so as you can see Jim has been at it again I've had a stressful few days with the opening of the University again for a new Academic Year and he just does this he just brings me roses so it was just delightful it has been a couple of days it wasn't even in the doghouse that's true once he went through with some roses and what happened yeah the uh woman behind the cash register said those are really nice roses you must be in the doghouse okay then so um it has been a couple of days because we've had rainstorms in the area and whenever we have rainstorms we have power outages and so it shut the freeze dryer down a couple of times which delayed but as near as I can tell it took about 21 hours for the freeze-dried carrots in about 14 hours for the dehydrator and um you know I went for years and years and years without a freeze dryer and so these freeze dried these dehydrated carrots turned out just fine now as I suspected um they stuck together when I did them in the slices but that is okay because they would rehydrate and separate just fine if you use them in soups or stews now what I'm going to do with these is powder them these are perfect for powdering and then this is how the shreds turned out they also stuck a little bit together they're like a webbed network but they would be just fine too and so I'm going to powder this batch because I'm in desperate need of carrot powder so these are going to be powdered these I'm absolutely thrilled with the freeze dried look how lovely these turned out even though they were stuck together and um after after coming out of the boiling water but when even now I can just touch them and they will separate they are dry like potato chips and they are sweet and lovely and these will be great for Soups and stews or anything that I need sliced carrots for and then the shreds turned out wonderful as well and this is and these are very separate so that makes it really really nice what I will be using the shreds for is for my mirepoix and that is carrots onions and celery together as the foundation for lots of Savory Foods like I just made a chili recipe the other day and um started with a mirepoix and it's generally what I use is a fourth of a cup of these shredded carrots a fourth of a cup of onions dehydrated or freeze-dried onions and the same for celery and then I rehydrate them and saute them in a little bit of ghee and it just makes a fabulous foundation for Savory dishes so that is the story on the carrots and I'm going to get them in the jars and we'll come back and show you how I seal them up but now I have something to report and I'm very happy about if you remember I had a lot of trouble when I would put the carrots in it would just stop the the cylinder from rolling around and I was saying that this just didn't make sense to me that I was disappointed I wasn't ready to recommend it how could anybody do engineering like this it just didn't even make sense to me especially such a good company I really like my kitchen machine and so I thought okay Pam what do you teach your students if a science lesson doesn't go right in their class who do they turn to First don't blame the students look in the mirror and so this was operator troubles because I forgot to put this on and so this little disc fits right there like that and holds that in very securely and I tried it with this in place it works like a dream so now I can wholeheartedly recommend this and I will be putting this up on our Amazon store because these carrots were so much work and I mentioned something about maybe you would just want to buy them I decided and I was checking the price on these augason Farms is having a sale on some of their things and it it's the best sale that I've ever seen and it's on they're on Amazon and I put I don't know five or six of the cans of vegetables in our store to make it easy for you I think they even have cheese powder which would be a really good idea too so you might want to check our Amazon store and see if any of those things are of interest to you and those are affiliate products as you know we make a very small commission and I mean it's a small Commission but 50 of that goes to two hospitals uh one is Saint Jude and the other is uh Primary Children's in Salt Lake City where my great-grandson spent the first four months of his life and he's a perfect two and a half year old right now so I'm gonna jar these up and um we'll show you the jars when we get back and I'll show you how we vacuum seal them so we'll be back shortly I always love this part of a project when we can see the yield and the fruits of our laborers so we got um two quarts of the slices and three quarts of the shreds and this is one full dehydrator full of carrots probably five pounds of carrots isn't that amazing so in any case this is just now with the amount of work and how fast I go through carrots I have to admit that I bought some augerson Farms carrots that were on sale a pretty good price as well as some celery because I just run out of everything I use for the mirepoix all the time so now I have some backups and you know and it's perfectly fine I'm not ashamed to tell you that even though I freeze dry and dehydrate until it's coming out of my ears there are times when I buy things from the store as well especially these days when we are trying to be opportunists and when we see a goodbye we strike so that's what I did now these two are already vacuum sealed now when you are drying vegetables whether you freeze dry them or dehydrate them you do not have to do what is called conditioning not with vegetables vegetables get very very dry with fruits we do and I'll address that in a different video but of either we can vacuum seal if you have one of these machines it if you don't get some oxygen absorbers this one would take either a 200 or 300 but I don't do that you don't need to do both this is a little attachment that goes over the top this is a Westin but the attachment set did not come with my Westin it is a FoodSaver attachment set so we got lucky that the hoses fit so here we go so checking sound just like these so this is sealed now you may remember from our video on vegetables that I have this cute little set of gingham Lids that I use for my powders the problem is that and a lot of you know because you have the same problem that this little attachment doesn't work super well and sometimes it just won't seal and so because I don't want to fuss with having to do it twice my routine now is to put the regular lid on the top and then another one upside down over the top of that one so it has a double lid and that extra bit of Heights with the lid seems to work most of the time [Music] let's see and it worked so we're good to go so and then I print up a label on my computer and it will will say carrots one of the things that I'm really anxious to find out is last time I made carrot powder I used the baby carrots freeze dried them I think it was freeze dried and powdered them and the powder turned white within a month and it tasted funny so now that these are vacuum sealed the other one was vacuum sealed as well but I no longer buy baby carrots I will only buy the long carrots I wish I could grow my own I've just not ever been able to be successful in doing that but I'm going to be very anxious to see if this holds because these are blanched it should hold the color so we're keeping our fingers crossed and we'll check back on that so thank you for being with us for our carrot Adventure it's fall time it's getting time to think about Harvest and putting up food and I always love that time of year so we'll be doing some more of this type of thing and we will see you at our next video foreign [Music]

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

Views: 23,548

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Id: WH-mZ6c0EG0

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2022