How to Make and Use Fruit Powders | Dehydrating Blueberries | The Purposeful Pantry

hey folks it's darcy from the purposefulpantry.com welcome to my channel i am so glad that you're here today we're going to be talking about fruit powders how to take fresh fruit dry it powder it condition it store it and use it so that you can use this fabulous stuff all the time it's one of my very favorite things to do so come along with me okay get started we're gonna do whole blueberries uh on a tray or two and then we're gonna do some broken blueberries to make powder with so we're gonna get started what i'm gonna use now is a this is an onion cutter um initially made for like putting into a piece of food and then being able to cut it in exact slices but this works perfect for blueberries um i used to use like a hair pick that i found for like two bucks uh and then one of my friends um reminding me that this was out there i was like ah that'll be even better because the tines are oh sorry i've got blue blue hands already uh the tines um are pointed in a different way than a pick would be and they will they will actually make going into the blueberries a little easier so the thing about doing blueberries is you don't want to do them whole like this they will take forever and what can happen is that you can get case hardening where the outside of your blueberry gets really dry and hard and closes up and then doesn't allow the inside the blueberry to actually dry so when you're looking at them you think gosh this is dry it's got to be dry it's fine you condition it you might even get to the conditioning phase with not seeing mold but then when you go to pick up your jar two or three weeks later you see mold in it so that's case hard plus because this is just a berry that's completely encapsulated breaking the skin will make it easier to dry it will make it more efficient to dry so you have some options i'll leave a link in the description box below to a blog post that kind of goes through all the ways to do this in more detail but you need to break the skin somehow you can use a method to poke it you can use a knife to slice it open you can use blanching or you can deep freeze them and then it will help too if after that you just press on them a little bit bit to help expand that so what we're going to do today because to me it's faster and easier i am just going to sit and poke some blueberries right there you go and these tines are pretty thick so um i only go through like in some of the really big ones that are in here but not really big because almost all these are pretty small i'll go through some of the bigger ones and then do them a second time if i feel i need to then you're just going to spread them out on your trays give them a little space so that they have efficient drying time because you want the blueberries because they can take two to three days you want them to be as easy to dry as possible okay if like me you want blueberry powder which is how i use my more than anything you're going to want to do something to take the drying time down you don't want to have to spend two to three days drying blueberries just to powder them and they can be a little harder powder when they're whole then the way i'm going to show you how i do it today now you could also puree these make them into a sauce you can cook the puree down a little bit to try to take out some of the extra moisture then go ahead and just make the fruit leather out of them just plain dry it store it that way and then make powder from that fruit leather as you'd like so what i'm going to do is take my food processor and i am going to pulse these and what i'm looking for are blueberry bits i don't want a full puree i just want them chopped up really well so they're in smaller pieces so here we go we're just going to lightly pulse these until they break up so now i'm just going to pour these onto a tray we need two trays for this let me see how this spreads and i will just spread it out and just like with any other food that you do uh you can sit and you can let this dry for a while then come in and mix it up i'm gonna take a little bit off and see if we can get this to spread out a little more we've got plenty of trays this is about as good as i probably am going to get right now although it doesn't look very appetizing this turns out to be something i just really really like i'm going to pull that one out nope it's good all right so i'm going to go ahead and do a few more of these trays and then we'll get started started dehydrating hey if you like what you're seeing hit that subscribe and the like button down below i would love to have you join our community and learn how to make dehydrating part of your food storage i'm excited that you're here thanks for watching okay so what i've got are trays of just the blueberry mush then my one tray of just whole blueberries that i have punctured well then more two more trays of the mush and then here is my control tray which is a strict two cups of fresh blueberries now remember two cups by volume is always going to be a little different because of the size of your blueberries mine are all pretty small so if you're doing anything by grams you want to measure that out ahead of time by weight if that's how you roll so while these these measurements are be up these are going to be approximate so they're not going to be exact so here you go so our temp is 130 oops our temp is 135 our time is as long as my machine will go which you'll see is 48 hours see you in a bit okay you saw with the photo um i had an accident so i lost almost all of my whole blueberries that i'm using but i wanted you to see what they look like when they're dry these uh took about these took about probably a good 24 hours to come completely dry for whole blueberries but what we're going to work with today is the crushed blueberries the ones that i mentioned all right here we go this is what it should look like when you're done these are still pretty warm coming out of the dehydrator so i would never want to test at this point but the the more and more they cool off uh the crispier they're getting so what i want is a completely crisp leather and you can still eat this it's a kind of this is kind of how we like our leather at our house we like to crunch your letters um and yes this probably stained my trays um i meant my fruit leather sheets but that's the way it is i could have used parchment paper if i cared about that we're just going to pull these right off this is why fruit weather sheets for doing leathers is so important over parchment because you can see the wetness that's here that would have been there parchment can actually soak that up and make things stick so you want to make sure that your fruit leathers are um not watery okay so we're going to just crinkle all these up like crazy i'll make going in the blender a little easier hey can you see that it's not perfectly ground yet but it's getting close so i just wanted to see what that looked like i'll put some in my hand oh it smells so good it's so blueberry okay that tray gave me about two tablespoons of powder a little just a little over like how the smell in this is just awesome okay here's something that can start happening with powders because of all the sugars okay that are in there they are very um apt to when they get heated they expand they can begin to stick to each other you can have compression packing which is when things get pressure put on them and they start compacting because of that pressure they can get start getting moisture really quickly so what i'm going to do is i'm going to transfer them all into a smaller mixer into a smaller jar so i can mix these up a little better because with less movement more of them stay right at the blades to to grind so just transfer this over here then i'm going to grind them a couple more times in this smaller one and then i'm going to show you what i do next which is conditioning a powder um you could call it you know drying it more whatever you want to call it but it's a method to ensure that the powder that you've created that you've been working with for a little while that may have started compacting may have started absorbing the moisture can then dry out completely so let me finish grinding this okay so what i'm going to do now that my oven has is preheating to 170 um to allow it to go to its lowest temperature which is what mine goes to and it's going to sit there and re in preheat we're going to add all of our powder to a fruit leather tray a fruit leather sheet excuse me that is oven safe you can use a silicone sheet whatever you've got parchment paper would work just fine with this too if you don't have it okay so what i want to show you is something called compression packing it's from the pressure of the weight of the powder onto this really sugary powder on itself so you're going to have clump you might actually end up with you know when you're pulling it out of your jar with some bigger clumps like this that aren't wet it's the sugars that are still warm from having been activated with all that friction um so all you need to do is just spread your powder out onto your sheet take care of any of those by just breaking up those clumps and what we're going to do is we're going to put this in the oven once it has preheated then i turn it off um and then turning it off i'm allowing the heat from the oven to just stay in there and that will help take out the moisture that might still be in these in these powdered bits of blueberry plus it will dry off anything that might still be wet you know any moisture that's still in there is going to help remove the moisture now something else that you can do and i'll put a there we go i'm going to put a photo right here of what you can do if you want to do this in your dehydrator you can put them inside of a coffee cup i always say that a coffee filter or a muffin paper or something like that to put into your machine and it helps protect from the powders going out all into your machine when you turn it on that's another way to do it i just really prefer this method for me so let's put this in the oven and i'll show you what this looks like in about 15 minutes so okay something else you can do for a quick snack of breakfast and of course um i we would also sometimes do this with carnation instant breakfast for a quick breakfast on the go when one of my kids out for the morning and he's got to get a really fast breakfast this might be a way to do it we would put a package of the carnation instant breakfast into this jar a banana and some blueberry powder roll it all up if you want it to be icy you can add ice to this and then just go and that's breakfast on the go if you're in a real hurry and want something nutritious the best that you can get it so what we're going to do with this though we're going to do the yoga version which is a jar of um milk the leftover powders a banana a good blob of greek yogurt and that's a little too full okay and of course if you wanted to add some ice to this you could do that as well to make it more of a like a cold smoothie [Music] there we go all right so here we go the perfect little smoothie so this makes the perfect on-the-go breakfast or after-school snack for your kids this is a cute way to make any kind of smoothie with any of your favorite fruit powders now you can of course something i do almost all the time whenever i make smoothies we add flaxseed to it which grinds up or chia seed which adds some protein and some omega-3s but it's a this is a perfect vessel to include all of those powders that you're using into something that makes a really great treat for your kids and for you and of course you can use any kind of milk alternative if you don't drink milk okay here's what the powder looks like when it came out of the oven i lost a little footage when i showed you breaking this up but what you might find is it's a little clumpy but it's okay because it's dry and it's been uh sitting in the oven for a while so what you want to do is to take your fingers through and break it up and just allow it to come back to its powder form just don't let it sit in too long in the oven at too high of a heat because what you don't want to do is bake that powder so if you're smelling a really strong fruit flavor you might want to go ahead and try that again if you're smelling a really strong fruit smell you might want to go ahead and pull it out because it may have had been in there too long break it up with your fingers and you'll have powder what i'm going to show you next is if your powder is not as fine as you would like it another quick way to make it better now here's something i'm going to show you if you have a grind here that you're just not happy with you want it finer um you can run a second grind in your blender whichever one you're using whether you're using a bullet blender whether you're using your coffee grinder whether you're using a big one i don't need anything finer than this because i don't use it for things that require fine powder like i'm not trying to do much icing in the way of icing that needs like was needs a smooth surface remember that your powder when you're doing it this way is fiber it's not going to dissolve the way a like a kool-aid would into something because you're still dealing with the actual fiber of the fruit another way to get pure powder that will dissolve better is if you dehydrate just the fruit juice or you can get a better version if you're doing uh something like um freeze-dried fruits they can actually give you a little bit of a finer powder so what i have here is a sample of something that i went through and just ground in my coffee grinder not because it's better than my nutri ninja because it's not it's because i had a smaller amount to do and the smaller amount keeps all the product down closer to the blades so i'm going to go ahead and take a little bit more of this so that you can see how i do it i am just going to put some into my grinder try not to make a huge mess which as we know i am apt to do i'm going to put my jar in place come on go in just grind this a little bit more when it actually locks in place there we [Music] go [Music] okay as you can see and as i pour this this is a much finer grind well let's see not that time wasn't even because i didn't do it quite as much as that first time but you can grind this more and get a bit of a finer grind something else that you can do is you can actually sift this through a very fine mesh strainer and you can pull out the larger bits and then just grind them again so these are options for you you can do this at any point that you want to do but here is your very fine grind now if in fact that you want to go ahead and condition this again you can or you can just leave it like it is because we're not getting any clumping here i can already tell that it's gone through the stage it's good so we're going to store this and i'm going to store these together because i don't need a super fine grind on mine okay so there we go i'm going to warn you when pouring this stuff it can be it can pour clumpily which means you might get like you might get some trickles and all of a sudden a bunch of it goes at one time so be very careful about your pour okay so i'm gonna make a very small hole for it to go out of so we don't worry about it clumping all over the counter and ideally in the perfect world i would be storing this in a pint-sized jar clean this up because what you don't want to do is store a bunch of powder in a jar that's too large for it because then what you're going to have is all of this air that contains oxygen and moisture that will cause this to clump and go bad faster so i would put it in a smaller jar but because i'm working with this right now this is what i'm gonna do so i can show you all the things so in the perfect world you would also want to do this okay take a moisture absorber and put it in with your powders seal your jar up this is not going to seal this jar what this is going to what this is going to do is it's going to control the moisture that's in the jar right now so any moisture that's in this air it's going to absorb and it's going to absorb any kind of moisture that may still be in here what you don't want to do is use the moisture absorber as a means of finishing drying whatever is in your jar never use it that way because it's not what it was meant to do it is meant to control the moisture that is introduced into your jar every time you open it whatever might still be there in the gap that you still have it's there to control extra moisture not to control the moisture that is in your food here okay so remember that okay as i said in the perfect world you want to put your powders in a jar that's the right size for the volume of powder that you have now some tips about powders blueberries will last in your fridge for you know five days frozen blueberries are good for six to six months to a year with the best results i'm sure you're gonna get i've got blueberries that are two years old in my freezer right now dried blueberries and this is the measles little things that i have here these will last in your pantry for about a year i would also use moisture absorbers with any fruit that i'm storing but because we're talking about fruit powders today fruit powders should be blended for when you need them not to store for long term the problem is is that as you've powdered this blueberry down to this point you've exposed so much more of the surface area of the blueberry to all of the things that are bad for for dehydrated foods which are light heat and water okay so even if you're keeping this in a dark cool place you've still exposed so much more of this to anything that's going to be affected affecting its long-term storage so my recommendation for doing fruit powders dry your fruit come up with your whole fruit dried this way this way or in the leather whichever way you choose to do it because you can do it from both store it as your whole dehydrated product and then powder it on demand and so for demand i don't mean that you can only powder exactly what you need for that day but don't powder more than you're going to use up in a month or two then you can store it easily on your shelf keep it as fresh as possible then when you run out you powder some more from your dried produce okay so fruit powders tend to last from six to nine months and much like spices if you cannot tell what it is when you open your jar if you don't get a good whiff of powder try crushing in your hands if you still don't get a good whiff of whatever that fruit powder was it needs to be changed out now you can still use it because it's going to still have some fiber in it it's going to have some vitamins in it still but it's not going to have the flavor it's going to have all the sugar and you don't want to waste it necessarily but i wouldn't use it as the main flavor component of something that you want to use grind up some more have fresh powder to use to get the best flavor of anything that you have so if you'd like to learn more about using fruit powders i'm going to have a link in the description box down below that's 25 plus ways to use fruit powders it's got a ton of ideas for you to use fruit fruit powders of any kind in every way so from breakfast to dessert all throughout the day how you can use these and if you'd like to learn about dehydrating more fruit check out this link right here and i hope to see you again next time happy dehydrating

Channel: The Purposeful Pantry

Views: 336,706

Keywords: the purposeful pantry, fruit powders, how to make fruit powders, how to use fruit powders, dehydrating food, dehydrating fruit, dried fruit, how to use dehydrated fruit powder, how to dry fruit in a dehydrator, fruit powder uses, fruit powder ideas, cosori dehdyrator, drying fruit with cosori, how to dry fruit, how to dehydrate blueberries, how to preserve blueberries, stock your pantry, dehydrating tips, dehydrating basics, blueberry powder, dehydrating tips for beginners

Id: rFMbyLIUkpg

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021