How to Dehydrate Blueberries for Blueberry Powder (OR how to save a dehydrating project fail)

so let me show you my complete dehydrating blueberry fail this week welcome back to my channel this is Darcy from the purposeful pantry calm where we talk about dehydrating and food storage for your family I was going to walk you through the five different ways that you can prepare your blueberry for dehydrating such as not doing a thing to it which takes forever you can freeze it you can blanch it you can just take a knife and slit a little slit along the skin you can use a tool to help you do more than one and I'll show you that in just a minute or you can blend them in a blender at puray and do them as a fruit leather so keep this in mind when the video happens I just wanted you to know that this is more now a video on how to rescue your dehydrated project that might not have gone the way that he'd hoped we have removed that moisture as much as everybody get out of there we're going to pour this on to a clean tray what I have now is a tray full of blueberries that are basically one level just a single layer we don't want them stacked on top of each other I don't know if you can see this in the camera we do not want them stacked on top because we don't want a big blob we want them to freeze on their own we will put these into the freezer for about a day maybe two if you have the time it needs to be a hard frozen blueberry you don't want it to be in there for just like an hour two and think that they're frozen they need to be really super frozen in order to believe break that skin so these are going in and next we'll get to the pokey method for our next technique we are going to be giving the pokey method when you are talking about trying to be header at this blueberry there is a little tiny hole that happened at the top where this student comes in but that's not really enough to dehydrate this well you could cut all these in half but for me that is way more effort than you need to do it's very messy it's not worth the time that it takes to do it so what I found are two ways of making this happen that make it go fast a hair pick I prefer the kind that has the metal skewers on it instead of the plastic ones these are thinner so they catch the blueberries without tearing them open they're sharpers they go through a cleaner than those the larger plastic versions and they just make it easy I also have this model what you can see when I did the first batch here I have it I need you up back and clean this this is not to be used with pets ever but this is a pet undercoat comb all right so how this works I actually prefer the pick but I had picked this up some point last year so to try this to see how it worked thinking that have him a little extra push what helped me pick them up so that's what we do poke them and put them on your tray press too hard because if you see if you break one and it squashes it it's gonna release all the juices out or you don't really want it release yet these have been washed they've been rent to the tray had been washed and rinsed I just prefer have them in a smaller enclosure than having them out on a tray where you have to kind of chase them down this makes it so much easier but you can also use this got these there you go Brabham and so I'm gonna finish these off and then we'll get to the next one what just bland you okay so our last method is to actually do a very short blanching of our blueberries I could just do this whole thing in two here doesn't quite fit so I'm not going to I'm going to go ahead and pour some into my little sieve and do them a small group at a time because what I'm looking for is to break the skin not blanch them there's a difference so here we go just to go down I can't so I'm going to turn off my burner real quick and I'm going to spread these out very gently because they are broken now so they are going to get some juices around which again is why you have your parchment paper out it's not focusing there we go all right route to ready to go in dehydrator sorry third way is to actually just take your frozen blueberries and pop them right on top right part of the freezing process means that all of the cell membranes have been altered so as they thaw and dry out on hydrator they will dry quickly I would spill protect your sheets because as they break they will release juice and because I always do this I always have like when my fruit leather sheets the silicone sheets on the bottom of my dehydrator to catch any drips at the bottom of the machine machine doesn't get messed up so let's get these in the dehydrator and start our drawing session okay so you can see I have a single sheet down here in the bottom of my dehydrator ready for this next batch of dehydrating let's get those blueberries going my head right here normally when I tell you to always get these going you get them warmed up I don't have it happening right now because I'm talking to you and you wouldn't be able to hear me with it open but I just pulled out spinach from overnight so it's still warmed up ready to go any helping me remember it is frozen on the bottom hope in the middle blanched on top into the machine the door on turned to 135 for fruit and here we go okay this is a quick update about 10 hours later these are trying to remember froze it on the bottom poked blanched okay let's get to some of the real-life fail stuff when we last met I was working on these being then dehydrated and then we had a bit of emergency fail all over the weekend I got a little sick on Sunday these things ran for another day and a half don't know it once you yeah a day and a half almost two days without me even remembering them nobody paid attention the fact that the machine was running to come turn it off so now what we have our little party what I kept calling them I know you can't see it in this so well but I was joking that they look like fish eggs they are completely just disintegrated dried down to the last little bit there's a hard core right in the middle that's a little chewy but these would not make good snacks they have been over dried and I always tell anybody who's joining our dehydrating group or anybody who asked on the blog can you over dry things and I will always say if you stay in the right parameters know you can never over dry but in fact you can over time if you read things out too long or you may make them to where they are just not something that are anything that you want to eat so what do I do with these it's not like I'm gonna put these in the pantry for anybody to eat as a snack because these are just not anything anybody would want to eat but what we can do is what I've love to do most try salvage these the best I can and make some blueberry powder so let's get start over that so how am I gonna save these blueberries this is how I bought this ninja it's called a nutri blender no nutri ninja and it is like a small blender not like a big blender with small mix movies that's the point of it but it helps so much with doing anything you have her two powders and it's good for making small dressings it's just good for a lot of stuff and when I purchased it I was doing it hoping that it would be a good go-between between my coffee grinder and my large blender especially when I have middle sized things and I don't want to keep going through the smaller coffee grinder because running it that much can actually burn the motor out but it's not enough into a large blender because you don't have enough volume to get a really good grind so this was my in between and I have fallen in love with it so what we're gonna do is we're going to start putting our blueberries into the jar that the ones that I just put in worthy these are the blanched blueberries and I'm gonna go ahead and put it in the Koch blueberries review these at one big batch and just so that you know that I think I mentioned that a little while ago that I did in fact take the papers out of the blueberries once they got past that really runny stage where they could have been dropping juice everywhere I'm gonna save this because my counter is brand new clean I did it just before I started so I'm actually gonna save this powder so I did take the papers off midway through the process to make sure that these got a really good dry around the entire surface area of the blueberry instead of having the paper there to kind of being the way for a while but that at least saved all any juices that came off of them from getting stained staining down through it dripping through I also had a sheet on the bottom of my dehydrator to make sure that it caught there and it'd be a little less cleanup to you later alright so what we have is the Nutri ninja ready to powder now you can do a longer pulse I may no longer run at this you don't have to pulse it this much this one actually because it's got such a good motor can take a longer grind I'm just too opting to go ahead just do it in pulses and again I'm not trying to sell this thing I'm not they're not sponsored I don't care if you use one or not I'm just using it because I'm finding it a good tool and just kind of walk you through how this works now this may take more than one grind to get through everything but that was a quick way to get that whole or down to a powder okay it should have put something down to catch all that so what we have on the first run is this beautiful dark powder that's that looks a little bit like coffee that smells wonderful it's a really rich blueberry smell I'm it's it's wonderful stuff so put it back in add my last tray and this one is the frozen blueberries that broke down really well for the drawing time although they're still trying to be very but they're edible and you can totally eat these and I know that I could leave them out a little bit and let them be a little bit of moisture so they're not quite so dry but the mouthfeel is not really Pleasant and I know my family won't eat them a snack so this is how [Music] but that's not unusual is it honey so I hear my husband's in the background he's ignoring me all right let me get make sure this is on correctly because it's not quite straight which I'm also in habit of doing is swimming things I'm a little crooked there we go ready limit noise again yeah we are good to go I'm only feeling the couple so what I'll do is wear it through a sieve and make sure that I get out the the cores of those things that still do not want to write another way down I'm giving one more grind after that and then we'll be good to do the next step so I'll be right back all right so what I have here is a very fine straighter it's very fine mesh and all I'm really trying to do is just get the bigger pieces you can use a little bit bigger mesh because you're likely not to have an issue all right so what you're seeing is between sugars and heat because this does warm things up just a little bit and just the pressure of the powder you're gonna see it where it clumps and I know a lot of people have problems with this with some powders but we're gonna make this work I promise just be patient through the process so what I'm gonna do now is just make sure that I've gotten all of the larger chunks out okay what I've got is the last little bit of the dregs of that where I've got some blueberry cores that are still there and I've left some of the powder in there to give it enough volume that it will help do this I don't want to just leave it just a couple of things and here we go Oh help if I put the back end wouldn't it now for those of you with a Vitamix or Blendtec or one of those you know the super powerful blenders you're probably not gonna have any problem with this at all and I have the running through here there is just the slightest little bump of a couple of cores left and I'm gonna be good with that so we're gonna mesh this out and be ready to do our next step of drying so you wanted to show you at the end of that sifting what I have left and got rid of for all the seeds you can see how what I'm doing now is creating a tray for my powders and excuse my hands is a blueberry kata everywhere you got four watch them a couple times when you dry in your dehydrator you can actually put powder on a flat surface put another cover over it and it's not likely to ever blow out unless you remember or forget to you like I do turn off your machine before you open the door what you should never do so what I'm gonna do is create this quick little tray that can go in here that I can put my powder on spread it out I'll do two of them because I've got quite a bit of powder to do and we will make little trays to dry our powder in that will catch it at home both spring so what I've done is I've taken a piece of parchment paper and for those in the you and the UK or I'll show you in other places this is the same thing as baking paper I'm going to fold all of my edges to create these little troughs and then I'm going to take my I have a little handy mini stapler here and I'm just going through staple these together to put them together some people have used small bull nose or Bulldog quotes willing tiny ones I don't have any right now so this just works just fine just as well sorry so what I'm doing is just making sure that I have a permanent corner here these won't fall down all right there we go pour it as we begin to start laying out our powder and I can tell you that while this powder is completely dry it's so little sticky just because of the sugars involved in it I'm going take it help it smooth out spread it through the whole thing so you just get really dry throughout the whole everything is a thin layer and so something's thick to make sure that it all has a chance to finish any drowning that it might need to do but really what we're doing is you're trying to dry out what our moisture is collected as I've been working with it okay shakings you would have done we've got the plate the bowl and my tray all ready to go through the drying time one more time just replace the door on and we'll get it dry again check back in a minute I wish that the light in my house wasn't so gross in my laundry room so that you could see this we have no outside light right now because it's raining but you can see this is bright purple I mean it is so colorful in the camera because the yellow light of my of my laundry room light well change that makes us a little grayish but this is bright purple and it is ready to go it is dry it's been there for an hour just drying off whatever moisture is still left when you find this and you start storing it you're gonna see that it gets still a little cakey because you can do it but that's the sugar in the blueberry and I'll show you in just a minute one way that you can remedy to that but this is gorgeous stuff and the smell is awesome so just a note about humidity levels in your home I do happen to have AC and I can run it when I need to and you can see that in my house right now it's only 35 percent humidity because we've been running it outside it's raining and the outside humidity is 91% so I can kind of judge my in-house humidity by this and it's a really helpful tool to know if it's a time when I should be dehydrating or if I should be working on powders because what I don't want is a high humidity level in the house and having my powders just constantly absorbing whatever humidity is in the air making it harder for me to store them safely you can write AC you can make sure that you're not trying to do this when the humidity level in your house is more than 50 60 percent and you can also store things with moisture absorbers or also called desiccant packs inside of your powders to help make sure that it absorbs any humidity and any moisture that may be in your powders so let's get started on packaging these up they've had time to cool down so we're ready to put them in jars okay take two there's nothing like going through half your video forgetting that you didn't have it turned on so we're gonna try this again what I have here my parchment paper full of all of the dehydrated powder I just put all of it in one place because it just made it easier I used a spatula you can see just just scrape down the plates to make sure I got it all here I use my fan brush because it helps get any loose bits off in in here so that we're not wasting anything I have my canning jar that is clean my wide mouth funnel because it's really important it helps collect most of it the end of here not make such a mess on the floor mess on the floor I have a package of desk in packs and these are our silica gel that you may find in things like camera equipment and shoes and handbags and and other kind of things that they try to absorb any moisture that might be in the air these are really helpful to help keep all of your powders dry what I also have is a smaller canning jar and some arrowroot powder that I'm going to show you in just a minute how you could store this if you choose to instead so first I'm going to do is put most of my powder into a regular changer how I store it all right so I got all of that now if they want to at this point I could take my little plastic tree that I did make a little bit of mess on I will fold it in and do the same thing well I'll just take my brush and brush down all loose bits and for some of you may find this fussy whatever turf in this powder this powder is really good I do not want to waste a bit of it all right so what I could do at this point if I sure - I could just go ahead and be ready I don't want to make sure to put a label on it so that you know that this is blueberry powder because it looks a lot like blackberry powder and I can store this on the shelf but what you're gonna find there is a little headspace here where there is trap moisture inside of my jar so what I would want to do to ensure that I have all of the moisture out in here that I can possibly get out is put in a desk compact now there are charts that will show you online about how many of these you should use per sized jar that you have for today's demonstration I'm just gonna throw that one in there so that you can see it goes right inside its food safe it's fine and what this isn't sure that the moisture that's still remaining in the jar because remember even in my house it's thirty five percent humidity so there's a little moisture still around this will absorb that moisture and it will help keep the moisture out of my jar but still this is going to cake because it's sugar it's it's just going to cake so before I use it I can either just sit and shake the jar like this and it will take care of almost all those clumps or make sure that you have something that is not metal because you don't want to use metal inside of your camp in soaking jars because it can cause stress on the jar which could break it if you end up using this in your canning it could stress it in cluster break later so you use plastic use a little wooden skewer and just go through here and stir it up that does the exact same thing so if you wanted to vacuum seal this you could I tend not to vacuum seal my powders just because it's messy but you can use a muffin cut paper to put over on the inside of a jar over your powder use a handheld vacuum sealer or use your regular vacuum sealer and then vacuum seal this and the powder won't get up into your sealer let's put this aside and Outrigger do you is a brand new penny jar that's been cleaned and dried I personally do not use this method so it's not that I it's bad I just personally don't use it I don't really want to add any other kind of powder into my regular powders it's fine to do though it's food safe it's perfectly safe for you and it's a way to help stop be taking typically in a quart jar you would use a quarter teaspoon of this powder so I'm just going to use the very bare minimum of this so that you can see what you would put in a little bit of arrowroot powder shake it up now for the most part you cannot see that got a little on the outside that powder in your powder but what it will do it acts like an anti-caking agent so that it will help this not cake up you could also use rice I don't use rice but you can because it works but for me the best bet is to put a desk can pack in or just know that your powder you're gonna take it just shake it up it will be fine so now the inevitable question what the heck do you do with this powder now you might use it in putting it into muffins so that you have a bluing muffin you can use it for food coloring to do things like that you can put an icing to make the icing blue my favorite way to use any of the powders because it makes it easily accessible and I do not like floating things on my yogurt at all I will actually any kind of powder into my morning yogurt so couple dollops there oh good heaping teaspoon err stir it up and I've got blueberries in my yogurt that don't have 40 things and I use a little bit too much blueberry powder here because the one thing that you have to remember even with dehydration its luck carries the same amount of sugar that you would if you were using straight blueberries you still have the fiber you still have minerals and vitamins but you still also carry the same amount of sugar that's one thing that people tend to forget that it has it so get that better blended and make a bigger mess because I'm trying to do this on camera so I can't do it well blueberry you ever okay thanks for watching through to the end I hope that you find a way to use blueberry powder for you I'll link up another dehydrating video right here for you to watch next and rage that you

Channel: The Purposeful Pantry

Views: 32,012

Keywords: dehydrating blueberries, the purposeful pantry, dehydrating fails, how to make fruit powder, how to make blueberry powder, dehydrating frozen blueberries, do i need to blanch blueberries, how to preserve blueberries, blueberry powder, how to use blueberry powder, how to dehydrate blueberries, preserving blueberries

Id: nRJSBuszydM

Length: 27min 53sec (1673 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 21 2019