Food Storage: Freeze Dried and Bottled Mandarin Oranges

at the store the other day we found a great deal on mandarin oranges so we're going to freeze dry some and we're going to bottle some hi i'm jonathan and kaine jones and we are the provident prepper when you're feeding a large family you look at for really good sales and the other day when i was at the market they had these large bags of mandarin oranges for only two dollars and fifty cents a piece so i thought that is the perfect time for us to try freeze drying some and then we're gonna bottle some also so that we'll be able to compare them in two different ways okay and now it's time for the work all of the oranges have to be peeled we want to get as much of the white off as we possibly can because that's what makes it taste bitter but quite frankly this isn't that hard so what i've done with these is i've cut an end off each side just a little bit and then i'm slicing them in thirds and placing them on the tray i think if we do it in sections i'm not sure if it will be able to get inside and dry it out enough but i think that this should look really pretty and allow plenty of ability for it to dry now teach us what you're doing okay i am just peeling the mandarins and sectioning them and putting them in the jar trying to fit as many as we can reasonably without just mashing them in there so we will fill seven jars to do one batch of cork jars always has to be an even batch you know that's right so here you have it some beautiful beautiful mandarin oranges ready for the freeze dryer seven jars ready to go in the canter still a bunch for fresh eating it's gonna be good let's see how this is done [Music] [Music] okay so this is really really interesting weird kind of kind of weird so the these are mandarin oranges so they're incredibly sweet right um and they they've kind of bubbled up and kind of like what the gummy bears did but they're really nice and dry i like them though those are really good oh that is really good great snack wow okay there's some kind of uh you know mandarin oranges have a little bit of what would you it's not tart at all but it's a kind of like a wow flavor tangy like these are super good they are really good i almost wonder if we should package them up for storage because i don't think they're gonna last that long now oranges can be bottled in either water syrup or in fruit juice but we decided to put honey in them just a little bit and the reason why is because our benjamin still won't eat any sugar normally i wouldn't have any issue just putting a little bit of sugar in each one of these um not that you have to have it but i think sometimes it does improve the flavor and it helps with preserving it over time but a little bit of honey should do the trick too you're welcome ben okay now that there's just a little bit of honey in each one of these i am going to fill them right up to this little rim with very hot water okay we fill these with hot water and one of the things that we want to do is just take a knife or something and we just kind of want to displace the fruit just a little bit and make sure that we get all of the air bubbles up and out so that we don't have any surprises and then we're going to clean all of these lids to make sure that there's nothing on the surface that might prevent it from sealing appropriately because that's always a bummer um these oranges look so beautiful in these jars okay now these lids have been heated in just boiling water to soften the little rubber on the seal to help it to seal better this is what they call raw pack because we put the fruit in raw it hasn't been cooked and these are all nice and snug and so we're going to water bath canned them for 15 minutes for our elevation make sure that you always look that up to find out how long you should water bath can something for your area our mandarin oranges are done processing so we are going to pull them out and let them cool now normally we would be doing this in the summer and we would do it outside but because of the cold outside we don't want the jars to break so we're just going to do this in the house and they look really good [Music] so and this is one of the easiest things that i've canned recently getting those oranges in the jars didn't take very long and they didn't take very long to process and they really do look good so we're gonna let them cool and we will maybe have to break into one of these and taste them we filled four quart bags and one quart jar and then also these now okay these take up a lot of space um so yeah they do yeah so they take up a lot of space they are incredibly delicious and we are just going to um be eating some of these because i think they're a really fun snack food we also bottled seven quarts of um mandarin oranges so we're going to try both of those so we tried the oranges just freeze dried and they they're like orange crack they're just so yummy and addictive and and good here you can have fork right so the bottled ones these had just a teeny bit of honey added to them they're good yeah they're fine and then rehydrated i don't know oh it's not quite all the way rehydrated it doesn't rehydrate well not really not pretty good but but that's really interesting um so when i'm looking at my food storage remember my goal is to take something that wasn't shelf stable those oranges would have only lasted um a couple of weeks maybe three on the shelf however by freeze drying them i can get about 25 years theoretically if we don't eat every single one of them yeah um and with the bottling officially you can get a year but usually we're we do more like four years sure if it's in a cool dark dry place yeah so we found that last much longer but and now so if we're gonna use this in our food storage there are so many really good recipes that use mandarin oranges but the one that we chose to do today is just out of shelf stable it's a and mandarin orange rice because i thought that sounded like a really good food storage staple kind of thing we are going to use real peppers in it because we have these growing right back there in our indoor garden um otherwise we do have freeze-dried peppers and they would work perfectly fine in this recipe so let's get cooking okay first thing we did was put some olive oil in the pan this is some dehydrated onions that have been rehydrated a little bit much with the water there peppers from our indoor garden you could totally use freeze-dried or dehydrated and i would reh well it's kind of a toss up whether or not you need to rehydrate them because they will ultimately become rehydrated in the with the rice but you have to account for that with the liquid and it's also kind of nice to have them browned to start with so we're just going to saute these until they're tender i'm just going to add a cup of rice and now we're going to brown the rice with these vegetables and i'm going to add the chicken broth you can use shell-stable chicken broth or if you don't have anything else you can always just use a chicken bouillon but don't add any additional salt because that's pretty salty in and of itself quarter teaspoon of salt half a teaspoon of the orange or a half a cup of the orange half a cup of the orange juice some pepper i'm going to bring it to a full rolling boil put the lid on it reduce the temperature to low and let it simmer for 15 to 20 minutes all right the rice is tender we're gonna add the oranges and just stir them in it really looks kind of pretty all right we'll turn this off and i'm just going to let it set up as i was tasting some more of the bottled mandarin oranges they taste just a little bit bitter where these are very addictive and why just keep eating them like crazy and i think maybe part of it the comparison's not really fair because these taste like concentrated sugar yeah but um i'm not sure if it's the white part of the oranges or what but all right let's taste this because all food storage right we want to be able to cook mmm that's good i like it it's different it is a little bit sweet it's more of a i don't know mandarin how funny mandarin oranges more of a kind of oriental type rice yeah it is the butt um definitely good so how do i feel about mandarin oranges being freeze-dried i think they're delicious i'm not sure that they're something i would work on on my long-term food storage probably not i think they take up a lot of space they're kind of in the same category as treats yeah that's true that's true so but that's my personal feeling and it'll be interesting because we're going to try regular oranges we have some of those to try too and see if they turn out a little bit differently than the mandarin oranges did a couple of things that i thought of um first of all these are not going to have as much nutrition in them because they have been processed in hot water true which has killed some of the nutrients so and all the vitamin c right these these are all shelf stable they're all going to last for some extended period of time but these will probably have more nutrition even though they're kind of a sweet treat they say about 98 right they'll retain about 98 so that's that's really good quite a vitamin c i i agree it's probably not something that we would focus on yeah but definitely something fun and this is a new thing for me maybe for you too yeah this is new for us we're experimenting on all of this and it's it's really been fun and now for the question of the day what is your favorite recipe to use mandarin oranges in comment below and thanks for being part of the solution

Channel: The Provident Prepper

Views: 2,821

Rating: 4.9615383 out of 5

Keywords: SHTF, TEOTWAWKI, Freeze Dryer, Harvest Right, Mandarin Oranges, Bottled Oranges, Freeze-dried mandarin oranges, Prepper, Food Storage

Id: s61h2TMfOGY

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021