How to Dehydrate Spinach and Kale and Make Green Powder in Preserving for Food Storage

we're gonna take this large pile of greens from this to this in just a matter of hours stay tuned okay we're gonna get started what i've got here is a um salad spinner full of spinach that has been cut and has been soaking to clean it these are commercially purchased so i got these at the store and we're not growing spinach right now in our garden so i want to make sure that i get all of the sand and any creatures that might still be in there and what i'm going to do is i'm going to dump the water i'm going to run it through the salad spinner and get it all dry so it takes care of it but what you can do is with that i'm also going to be using some of this this is the bulk spinach this is packaged spinach it still needs to be clean no matter if it says it's pre-cleaned or not it says it's washed and ready to use i am still going to wash it one more time just to be sure because you may remember all of those recalls of spinach and greens and romaine lettuce that were in packages ready to go but they still had issues with salmonella was it salmonella or it was uh e coli we're gonna make sure this stuff is clean so let me get these clean and then we'll be ready to start prepping these for dehydrating okay when i'm doing spinach i will just dry the entire thing leaf stem and all because these stems are not particularly woody or thick and there's probably more if as much if not more nutrition in the stem is in the leaves so i want to make sure that i get everything and the thing with spinach is it will shrink tremendously so i am not so particular about making sure that this doesn't stack on top of each other because as it dries it shrinks a lot so if i were doing other kind of fruits and vegetables especially something like fruit i would never stack it because it doesn't shrink up enough and you have surfaces that don't get complete air circulation through them and can make drying a little more difficult and if not a little unsafe because you might have sections that don't actually get dry which can cause mold later if you don't make sure you properly condition and that you're storing properly so i'm going to load these trays up what happens with my dehydrator is that these are probably these are a little thicker than uh than the excalibur space gift so i'll do one every other tray i'll take out the extra and i'll dry these it'll take about six hours then i'll put another set in and we'll be going now you can certainly wilt this spinach if you'd like blanching is not necessary when you're dehydrating greens it's necessary for cooking because it allows the oxalic acid to be released which helps you absorb the nutrients of the spinach much better than if you eat it raw but however we eat raw spinach for salad as well so i'm going to get these two dries going i'm going to go ahead and wash up my bag sponge another couple trays and we're going to get started see i've also got kale on here soaking making sure that we get it nice and clean all right there is nothing like recording a whole segment for a video that you forgot to hit the record button so we're kind of going into midstream with this and i'm going to kind of recreate what i did so that that way you see that my trays aren't clean because i had to unload them so here we go what i had was a sink full of kale i would take the stem out i would strip the leaves off of the stem and set them in my salads better the stems went aside because you can use these stems to either put in your stock pile for making chicken stock or vegetable stock or whatever you'd like or you can go ahead and dehydrate these to add to your powder as well but i do them separately from the leaves because they take longer to dry the smaller you get them the better and faster it's going to dry so just like with my spinach greens i'm going to put these back in the bowl i'm going to run these through real quickly stop it these have gone through twice now there's not going to be much more moisture coming off of them so i'll show you they dry really well and the less moisture on your leaves the last time it takes to dry what you can see i think you can see here is the water that comes out of them it's tinted green because the chlorophyll and some of the nutrients that come out from just washing you can save this liquid if you'd like by putting an ice cube trays freezing it and using it for stock later so if you're going to cook some rice up you can throw a couple of these ice cubes into your rice water and your rice will absorb the nutrients you can put it in stock or chicken stock or kale a meat or vegetable stock that you're creating your stockholm throw a couple of ice cubes in there and you've got more nutrients and flavor coming into it that way um so don't throw this away if you have the ability to store it i'm gonna go ahead and start loading my leaves now what's going to make this cool is that these if i were to try to slide them in on top of another tray in the next caliber um these will just get pushed to the back what we're going to do is go ahead and just stack this and smush those leaves and it's going to be okay do our next layer all right nasco on top of the excalibur um you can't see the top of it because it goes up so high i try to make sure that i have moved over as much as i can to let some of the heat to my excalibur to work better so what i'm going to do is that typically you will dry greens at 125. i like to also dry them at 95 because it helps keep more of the nutrients in the greens but today because i have a lot going through i'm going to go ahead and keep them at the 125 temperature and get them started all right here we go and then just let me warn you when you take off your door of your ex caliber make sure that the machine has come to a complete stop because this stuff will blow um even in the best of circumstances it's going to blow some in fact the bottom tray probably has some at the back no we actually did good this time i don't see there's a little bit on if you can see the back there the cage a little bit spun around so these have been for let's see officially five hours five and a half hours and they are well um dry you don't ever test anything until it's had a chance to cool down first because heat can still keep things moist and pliable but spinach dries in about three to four hours for me on my in my ex caliber so these are all dry they're ready to pull out to store all right here are the stems these are still after about five and a half hours very wet uh very soft they are not ready yet the kale is still while it's becoming dry it's not all quite well that fell through it is mostly dry but in some of the denser spots still soft so i know that's not done in the nesco it takes a little bit longer to dry than it does the excalibur it's um it just does so you can see that the spinach is also not dry at the bottom of the machine so we're going to let this go for another couple hours all right so this is my last tray and what i have here is a container air kite airtight container full of spinach chips so this is something that you can add to any meal by taking a handful of it and just dropping into your meal and you have spinach bulk as opposed to just having spinach powder which kind of blends in this would be like putting into your spinach into your spaghetti sauce or into any kind of alfredo sauce or anything that you wanted to have actual spinach leaves in put these in they will rehydrate while they're heating up in the sauce and you will have it like you had spinach this will save you a ton of room in your freezer so what we're doing is taking all of our leaves placing them inside of our container and then what we're going to do is allow this to condition the same way we would do fruits and vegetables i will give this about three days four days of the most because these are fully dried and i touch them all so i know and if it gets too full you can always pack a little bit if they get a little if they get a little broken it's no big deal then you place your lid on make sure it's fully sealed and over the course of the next week as you do this shake it up make sure that they've had room to move all around and check it every so often to see if you see any condensation if you see condensation or if you see any of the leaves start to change color or texture because you're seeing that they're absorbing some moisture you throw them all back in the machine and you go again all right so here is our kale all done all completely crunchy ready to okay now we're going to get started on the process of powdering we're going to be using um i'm going to be using my large blender i happen to have a vitamix that i saved up many years for just to get the basic one but i'm going to use it because i have it i also use a ninja blender any bullet blender will work and i find they work better even than coffee grinders but today because i'm processing so much having a larger blender will just make this go faster you can use whatever blender you have you do not have to have a vitamix i just happen to have one so let's get started i'm about to make a very big mess with all of my trays the one thing about the nesco goes that it doesn't make it really easy to dump all of your stuff so this is how i do it you might have a better way and if you've got a better way i'd love to hear it in the comments below to give everybody else an idea about how they can empty their trays things get stuck in here a lot too i could have used for other sheets and that might have made it a little bit easier but i find that it inhibits airflow more and i just choose not to use them if i absolutely don't have to so let's get all these emptied then we'll work on the spinach from the excalibur and we'll be on our way take my jar lid off this is a bit messy and i am a messy cook slash processor so if you were really if you're really good at this then cool i'm impressed so we're going to take this just as a comb dump the rest into here so what we have is kale spinach powder now i'm going to go ahead and empty this into a tray because the next thing you would want to do is go ahead and dry this for about an hour after because moisture from the air gets in here and you've created more air in the pockets and heat can cause moisture it can cause everything to heat up so for some people doing this a second time with the dehydrator after you've powdered it is a good option of getting the rest of the moisture that could be remaining out of your powder what i have are these uh lipped silicone trays silicone trays from bright kitchen that are great for fruit leather and they work really well for powders too they're new to me i've only been using for a little while and i absolutely adore this thing it makes drying so much easier for things that are liquid it makes powders easier because you have a lip that they don't get that things don't just blow off so easily and as long as you turn your machine on once your door is closed or your your whole stack is put together and don't open it again until the fan on your machine has come to a full stop you shouldn't have powder blowing everywhere but this lip helps do it but don't worry if you don't have this you can make your own i'll link to an icard above to show you how to make your own lipped trays from either the silicone sheets like i use here or from parchment paper they're it's super easy that's that's all you really need basically we're going to do is we're going to take this powder and just spread onto the trays you can see how me tapping is bringing more out from the bottom because the heat from running this process will make things get a little steamy introduces a little bit of moisture so things tend to clump a little bit so we're going to do this and i'm going to take my handy dandy art brush and come in here and clean out now touching this this is still warm from running through the vitamix so that's why you go ahead and run it through the processor sorry through the dehydrator one more time just to make sure because that there's no moisture because it feels warm and a little moist and you don't want to put this into a jar with either filling up your jar from your last batch that hasn't been too old or even putting in its own jar you don't want that moisture because you don't want to ruin this so let's put this back in the dehydrator for about an hour at 95 degrees okay what we have here is approximately eight cups of loosely packed dried spinach this comes in a 10 ounce bag from my local grocery store which is about nine and a half cups of fresh spinach leaves the equation is not quite the same because the press of um the fresh leaves compared there's no press in this and there's a lot of air gaps and air space in here but it's approximately eight cups of loosely packed spinach leaves dehydrated now we're going to see how much this one bag will equal to as far as the end product [Music] all right so let's see about how much this equals for powder now this is much finer than kale powder is i find that spinach powder is super super fine um so it gets everywhere as you dry it and you can save it all by using a brush you can't save at all but you can get much of it before you waste so that you're not wasting any of these bits but yeah i spend a little time making sure i get as much as i can because every little bit helps all right first what i usually do is i just brush down the sides because it's easier and most of this will come out with the bulk at the bottom now something i want you to look at because i get it in the dehydrating group on facebook all the time that people will say i dehydrated all of this spinach and this is all that i got out of it or any other product that you might want to talk about that you're thinking about the thing is is that it's not that it's so small it's that it's concentrated so you've taken out all the water you've taken out all of the bulk and you use an equivalency of a small amount of powder to equal the same thing that it would have been fresh as far as nutrients and taste and i will put uh the infographic right here however that works to show you how this correlates for one cup of spinach to a cup um how much powder it is so looking at my measuring this is approximately because i've got a bigger one i could use a smaller one i think this is approximately a quarter cup say that's maybe i think these are half pint little half pints from anchor hawking and i'm using a lid with a silicone ring that looks like i should have cleaned it better but it's not going to stay in here permanently i'm just doing this to show you so that's how much that you would get from it right there i hope that that gives you an idea about how much a whole bag of spinach is to this all right so here we go this is our spinach and kale powder you can separate these if you'd like i just go ahead and combine them all because i use them together in doing uh to add to any cooking that i'm doing it goes in everything i make from eggs to uh to brownies and yeah you heard that right i put this in brownies i'll link up in the i cards to to a post that's about green pattern how i use it i'll also link you up here about storage you just need to store this in airtight containment so a mason jar with a tight fitting lid an old spaghetti jar with a tight fitting lid that's airtight anything that you have that's airtight this is perfect so thanks for watching and i will see you again next time

Channel: The Purposeful Pantry

Views: 35,719

Rating: 4.9530449 out of 5

Keywords: the purposeful pantry, dehydrating, food storage, pantry, dehydrating spinach, drying spinach, dehydrating kale, drying kale, green powder, kale powder, spinach powder, how to dry spinach, how to dry kale, shelf stable food, dehydrating tips and tricks, dehydrated powder

Id: B9JnG8Vssho

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020