Deyhdrating Veggies the Easy Way

welcome to rose-red homestead today we're going to be doing a video another one on dehydrating this time I'm going to give you a fabulous shortcut for dehydrating vegetables so we'll be right back [Music] Jim and I really appreciate having frozen vegetables in our freezer ready to go just open up the bag pour it into a little bit of water heat it up on the stove and we have a nice side dish for meals the same is true for dehydrated vegetables only here's the difference with things in a freezer if the grid goes down we may or we may not be able to preserve those things but having some dehydrated vegetables on a pantry shelf really gives peace of mind and allows us to be prepared for whatever might happen I use dehydrated vegetables all the time in soups and stews so they are very convenient so here this is our shortcut we are going to start with frozen vegetables and I would so much rather use these than I would growing the vegetables myself peeling them chopping them preparing them for dehydrating now don't get me wrong I have done that before earlier when I had all of my children at home and I was a stay-at-home mom for a few years which I feel very blessed to have been able to do I took quite a bit of well I guess there's only one word for it pride and the fact that I'd like to do everything from scratch I baked things from scratch I cooked things from scratch I gardened and everything came out of my garden that I would do from scratch I sewed all of our clothes including my husband's suits well I am happy to tell you that I have outgrown that one of the things that I tell my university students is that in my class they're going to work hard so they might as well work smart and then I give them some short cuts and some ways that they can be much more efficient I've decided to adopt that mantra for myself I have always worked hard just like you I'm sure and if we're going to work hard we might as well work smart as well and using the these frozen vegetables is one way of really working smart if you have watched our dehydrating basics video you heard me explain three reasons why it is really important we need to blanch vegetables before we dehydrate them the great thing about starting with frozen vegetables is the blanching has already been done and the best part it was done by somebody else yay all right so here's what we're going to do we like to watch for really good sales on frozen vegetables and Jim found some good sales once a one-pound bag usually fills a tray and so we have about 6 pounds of vegetables here so I am just going to quickly open them and show you how I load them on the shelf on the tray and I put about 1 pound of vegetables per tray and this is a 12 ounce package so I'm going to open another one of these and put about half of it on here now you're probably noticing that I pile these up pretty deep and that's true I do because these dehydrate very quickly so these are several layers thick but in the morning when we take these out of the dehydrator after they're already done I think you'll be surprised at the space between all of them because the air gets all around these there's no problem with air getting the hot air to remove the moisture we'll get around them just fine and so this is about just a little bit over a pound per tray here and this mix this mixed vegetables is one that I especially like for soups and stews and then I can also use dehydrated potatoes dehydrated onions and just make the soup bass and throw these vegetables in and it's so convenient right now these are 2 pound packages also notice that in every one of the trays I have the little inserts in so that I can put pretty small things on them so these are 2 pound bags that Jim got a steal on so I'm going to put about half now these are Roly Polys so I've got to keep them from rolling every which direction mostly successful and these vegetables just become shadows of their former selves drink dehydrating we remove about probably 90 to 95% of the moisture in all of these veggies and they just shrink down to practically nothing ok and here's the last pound and I'd like to move these to the edges so that we can get them as thin as possible but I'm not at all concerned that they may be 2 or 3 deep because they will dehydrate just fine now I use those Peas when we do peas and rice and so I will I'll cook the rice part of the way and then I'll throw in those frozen peas and they will be just about right by the time that the rice is done and it makes for a very nice side dish sometimes when I'm making taco soup instead of using canned corn I will just throw in some of this dehydrated corn and it works great as well and you can use the that dehydrated vegetables for about the same things that you would use the frozen vegetables for these will reconstitute just fine if I want a side dish of veggies they don't taste 100% like they're frozen cousins but they're pretty close and these would be such a nice addition on an emergency preparedness storage shelf for when times get really hard if the grid goes down okay so here's what we're gonna do I'm gonna go ahead and put these in the dehydrator I'm going to set the thermometer or the temperature not the thermometer their temperature gauge for at about 135 I usually do vegetables between 135 and 140 but I'm going to start at 135 and I'm going to set the timer for as high as it goes which is 19 and a half hours it will not take that long but I like to set it all the way so that I control when the dehydrator shuts off I don't want it to turn off in the middle if I'm trying to guess how long it's going to take my guess is that these will take about 12 to 15 hours so we will be back in the morning after these are all completely done and I will show you the results and then show you how we package them so I'll see you in the morning good morning here we are these have been dehydrating all night long and it has been about 15 and a half hours and the corn finished up first but I just went ahead and let it go that extra hour to make sure that everything was completely dry so I have some pint jars here ready and if you remember the amount those big bags that we emptied it all over these trays see how much it's going to fill up so I'm going to move this here so you can see it and I'll just take this inner liner and then I bend it a little bit and everything falls into the funnel and then right into the pint jar and there are some slowpokes here so it looks like we are going to be able to get two pounds of corn dehydrated into one pint so we'll see this one looks like it has a little bit more alright so that is up to the very top if I have a few little leftovers I'm just going to make a one jar of a mixture I thought that might happen that's why I prepared a 1/4 jar so we'll see if 4 pints are enough now here are the Peas of all of these vegetables peas have the highest protein so it is always good to add peas to soups and stews especially in an emergency situation we're good meals with high protein are going to be very important so it looks like we'll have about the same situation although I don't know but if you remember how full these trays were when we put them in and now they're every every one of these peas nothing is double stacked everything is just down on the on the main tray that one was a little bit large I thought maybe it was soft but it wasn't it just popped and it was all powdery all right so all of these peas are going to fit in this pint a few of them right here we're just pushing them through the holes my goodness they are very dry they're powdering if I pinch them so very nice pint of peas now we will do the mixed veggies and of course the vegetable to take the longest to dry on these trays was the green beans everything else was Oh No Wow maybe they fell through to the next tray we'll see it's like some carrots have stuck here like I said last night when we were putting these in these mixed vegetables are one of my favorites to have on hand for soup soups and stews they're just really convenient and you can reconstitute them and have a side dish of mixed vegetables as well I can transfer the spill over here to this tray good how are we doing here about half that's going to be full so I'm just going to add these few extras to my catch-all jar here so we have three pints plus a little bit and of course that little bit is what I will use first now I would like to show you how I just finish these off in fact this corn may be just a little bit too full I think I'll put a little bit more in here now I'm going to vacuum seal these and the convenient thing about this is that I can use some of these or all but some of it and then I can completely revamp seal it and that's why I like to put these in jars is because I can keep everything vacuum sealed at all times now I am using reused lids these are clean and so I just put that right over the top and put this attachment there and turn this on it's thing I'm thinking that it's taking a little too long and it is I'm going to stop it see what's the matter here let's try a different lid make sure there's no cracks and we'll try again Oh better put the gasket in there's usually a pretty good reason why it doesn't seal still not ceiling I may have to well maybe it did it did so maybe it was just about to turn off and I just rushed it so that one is good so let's see about this one there [Applause] good sure for some reason on this regular-sized attachment the gasket comes out every single time it doesn't do that on the wide mouth so I don't know okay so here is the mixture mixture with a lot of air in it so we'll see what happens here I haven't never vacuum-sealed one with so little product in it so this may not take I don't know maybe it just takes a little time [Music] my goodness it didn't all right and the gasket stayed in and here we go with this one that was quick so that sound means it's all good six pounds of vegetables reduced to three pints and a little bit so not too bad these will go out on our emergency supply shelf out on our canning shelves and I will probably do several more batches of these to get us a year's supply we'll watch for sales on frozen veggies because we surely do like working smart and with great efficiency and this is really the most economical way particularly for us to do dehydrated vegetables but I always like to have a year supply of dehydrated vegetables on the shelves so thank you for joining us this has been a fun adventure and we will be doing more on dehydrating I still want to show you two ways to do potatoes and also Walla Walla onions will be on shortly and we're headed up to Washington to visit my daughter in a few weeks and when we come back we'll come back with some Walla Walla onions they live very close to Walla Walla so we'll be doing those sometime this summer as well so thank you very much and we will see you next time [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 440,073

Keywords: veggies, dehydrating veggies, dehydrating corn, dehydrating mixed veggies, dehydrating peas, why dehydrate vevetables

Id: s7TD3V23nY0

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2019