How To Make MREs! | Home Freeze Dryer | Harvest Right Freeze Dryer | Meal Ready To Eat

today i'm listening barbecue i'm going to be showing you how i make emergency meals ready to eat mres let's get going so i'm a big advocate of being prepared we have enough food in our household to last us for months enough water storage to last us for a long time and i always keep a couple emergency packets of food in my jeep for when i'm out jeeping i just want to make sure that if if something happens i break down and i maybe have to spend the night in somewhere where i hadn't planned on spending the night i'll be fed or if i get hungry and i want a snack so i have a freeze dryer that kind of helps me with food preservation and i not only use it for making my food stores but we use it we're a small family i cook a lot of food we don't eat all the food i cook we just it's impossible to so i freeze dry a lot of that food the food that i don't give out to my neighbors we freeze dry and i'm going to kind of show you how i make these little emergency mres went shopping at costco the other day and i'm cheating here i'm not using food that i cooked i have here this is made by a company called kevin's natural foods it's paleo which is a good thing right and it's lemongrass chicken this is cooked and then i have here this was interesting because it's made by a company i think they call themselves sous-vide masters or something like that masters of sous-vide well so the company's cuisine solutions whatever anyway they sous-vide sirloin they sliced s raw sirloin vacuum-packed it in bags then sous-vide it to like medium rare and then sold it to greggy here so here's what this looks like let me get it in frame there you go sliced grass-fed beef sirloin so these are going to be the proteins that i freeze dry and here so the sirloin comes in these little again i could toss these in a sous-vide have a meal what i'm going to do wow this looks really good i will lay this out when you're freeze drying again those lean meats work best i mean sirloin perfect choice and you also the thinner it is the better the better it will freeze dry [Applause] and i have videos where i freeze dried steaks freeze freeze-dried hamburger and it it's this process works very well it's it's it's fun now for this video i'm going to be freeze drying meat and fruit for whatever reason i neglected to buy vegetables i don't know why i would have but i just spaced out i guess if i were not doing this on video the way i would prepare these kits is i would do all the proteins one day like all the meat in one day so i'd fill up all four trays with meat and then the next day i would do fruits and then the next day i would do vegetables that's probably what happened in my head i don't know i have issues so i have these really odd little pieces i'm just sort of plugging up holes here with it so here's what the chicken looks like i guess it's like two chicken breasts it comes with a sauce as well i could freeze dry the sauce but it looks like there's already seasoning on it i don't know i'm gonna play this side by ear i might drizzle some of this on the chicken after it's in the trays let's see what this looks like see what's it looks like it's chunked up it's just all vacuumed together so that's that's good that's a good thing for me i think what i'm going to do is i'll get this on the tray and then i'm going to drizzle some of this sauce on it we'll freeze dry the sauce with the chicken this chicken i can tell this is going to freeze dry very well so again for freeze drying you want those ultra lean meats so i'm just going to go ahead and i was going to say drizzle but i'm plopping this sauce on here this what i'm doing here this particular dish here that this would be awesome for backpacking smear it around a little bit just i'm just trying to make sure that there's a little nice even coating on all the chicken and once we're rehydrating it the sauce will i mean turn back into a sauce it'll kind of disperse itself i guess is what i'm saying all right let me take these off and change my gloves out okay so this is these stuff i'm going with some fruit some strawberries that i sliced strawberries freeze dried are awesome and again just right out of the out of the package it's like candy and doing it at home is so much better than you can buy obviously freeze-dried fruit at the stores but it just doesn't compare because i think there's just a lot more quality control when you do it at your home yourself bananas and this is nice because this is real world stuff here these were bananas that we bought a big bunch of bananas and we just weren't eating them fast enough and these were starting to get to where eat them quick or make a shake so i sliced them up and these are going to be good you know when they start getting soft like that the sugars really come out to become much sweeter we have some pineapple i have a lot more fruit after i make this run for you guys i'm going to freeze dry all the rest of this fruit i have there we are meet you guys up in my home office where i have the freeze dryer we'll get these things going so this is my freeze dryer it's made by a company called harvest right and this is their medium size so this is the rack where the trays go and then again like i said above each one of these tray racks is a heating element get that chicken in first that sirline so once all the shelves are in there's a little insulated pillow so to speak to put in shut the door so we have custom settings we can run or the default settings which is what i'm going to run push start so now it's going to ask liquid or non-liquid it's non-liquid obviously pre-frozen or non-frozen it's not frozen drain valve so there's a drain valve for the end of the cook where you're draining the liquid if that drain valve is left open it's not going to pull a vacuum so it is closed now it's freezing it's going to freeze as you can see for 11 hours so now all there is to do is wait the machine has sensors in it that will know when the food is fully freeze dried goes into a standby mode basically it'll hold a vacuum and hold that deep freeze but there's no more moisture to draw so it's not drying any more moisture it will hold this this standby until i'm ready to remove it from the machine so you can't ruin any food by doing this i mean it'll just stay there until you're ready if it's not ready you'll know because the food will still be kind of soft it's so easy you just arrow up more time and until it's done so this child's play using this and here we are 16 hours later and it is done everything but a couple of chunks of pineapple they were done within that 15 hour time frame but like i said looks just like medium rare meat but it's like styrofoam crazy stuff one of the other things i want you to look at is the strawberries if i didn't tell you these were freeze-dried you wouldn't be able to tell and just like this oh the sweetness comes out bananas they didn't go all brown or anything like you know the the dehydrated bananas do the chicken again it's like styrofoam but all this is going to hydrate what i'm going to do now is show you how i put together these mres we're going to kick this off with the chicken and this is the bag i'm using for the chicken and i'll explain why what i did was i made two of these bags from one of these and this is a chamber vacuum sealer bag a chamber vac bag and the reason i wanted it long and narrow like this is because in each mre i'm going to pack an mre heater and i'll show you how this works when i'm done with this whole process but i will say that anybody who does any vacuum sealing if you do a lot of it uh believe me there it's a chamber vac in a vacuum sealer night and day the you know vacuum sealer sucks air out a chamber vac works in a chamber kind of creates an again an outer space atmosphere then also it goes positive really fast and seals the bag with within a snap of a finger and because it works that way you can actually vacuum seal liquids so i could fill this bag you know three quarters away with water and vacuum seal it's crazy stuff so throw in some chicken and again it has that sauce on top of the chicken which is also going to rehydrate and if any pieces are too big simply break it that looks like a pretty decent amount right there now this is going to be vacuum sealed i'll show you that process in a sec another small vacuum steel bag and i'm just going to throw a variety of fruit in here so mango and again i will not be rehydrating these i mean i could but this is just going to be a snack a little granola bar it's got peanut butter and chocolate nuts and everything i have a small mylar bag i'm going to place this in get these sealed up for you okay the chamber is big enough for both of these bags so fruit in meet in there we are so here's the bag that i'll be putting all this in it's a mylar bag you see i wrote what it is and the date i you know i'm looking at this i wish i would have freeze-dried some coffee or something some type of beverage but it's fine you guys are getting the message i think so there's the chicken there's in the bag that beautiful fruit a little snack bar in the bag unlike the military mres this is toilet paper and it's i don't know probably an eighth of a roll that i vacuum sealed just because this the whole purpose of this is for emergency use throwing in a pack of matches i think matches come in handy these are oxygen absorber packs this is going to remove all the oxygen from this bag once it's sealed and i have here two packs of emergency water this is basically water has been vacuum sealed in here and these packs have a shelf life of five years so i'll throw these in here again you don't have to use water to rehydrate the food you could eat it just right out of the bag but you know it's going to be better hydrated but if i mean if you're out in like really horrible conditions like out in the desert i would probably just drink the water then snack on the food then this is the mre heater throw this in here [Applause] throwing in some water purification tabs just in case you do come across water you can be safe about it so this is a heat sealer and what we're going to do is weld a bead and seal this mylar bag the mylar bag by the way it's notched so once it's sealed you just tear it open you don't need any tools to tear it open and there you go and as i was finishing the weld up i realized i forgot to put in the plastic wear no big deal i mean i'm tearing this open anyway to show you guys how this all works at the end so i'll just show you that sirloin vacuum sealed like i said looks just like sirloin i'm going to hold off i'm not going to put this in a pouch i want to again just eat this on camera for you guys the other thing i forgot to put in the pouch a plate that's a joke so let's go ahead and open this up easy stuff so obviously one of these is dedicated for drinking now these bags they're notched as well so just tear it open of course we got to get the meat down to the bottom [Applause] before i get this actually in the heater and the mre here i want to hydrate it a little bit so i'm going to add some water [Applause] so i'm going to hydrate this and then heat it up this has a sauce on it so i want to add enough water to actually hydrate the sauce as well i'm just pushing it down to make sure that it's completely covered with that liquid now the steak you can just tear it open now i'm just going to go ahead so i can get it all down to the bottom i'm just going to break it into pieces again it's like styrofoam so it breaks very easily i just want to make sure i can get this covered in the water this will hydrate very quickly because it's so thin okay now for the heaters and these work off it's a chemical reaction it has with water i'm gonna tear the top off first open it up [Applause] place that meat inside you see now you see why i made these bags i got the top of the food bag folded over same thing here slice it in the bag [Applause] make sure that goes all the way down to the bottom normally you know you'd have these resting up against a rock or something open up the water spill it that worked pretty good [Applause] all right we're gonna just i'm just gonna pour the water in [Applause] within a couple minutes these things are getting hot they're i don't know if you can't see them bubbling but they're actually filling the bags up you know with the hot hot air i guess that's the steam so normally i'd wait until the bubbling stops but i gotta get on with my video here so i got a fancy china dish and a paper bowl [Applause] get that onto the plate look at this this rehydrated so good it's funny i mean before i came out here and started this part of my video i broke a little piece off and put in a little coffee cup of warm water and gave it to my wife yeah you can't even tell it's been freeze dried mmm and this again had that sauce i can tell it's kind of a watery sauce now that's fine beggars can't be choosers actually now it looks like um like a stew now kind of like a chicken stew so this is fine just look at that chicken again now it's like chicken mmm oh wow i'm not sure their both taste really really good this was a success i mean like i'm really really happy this is good and and i hope the video conveyed the message i was trying to convey which is you know i like to have these little kind of emergency packs in my jeep whenever i'm going away from home somewhere out in the out in the desert or the woods whatever and i have kind of a like a rucksack that i keep in the back that has all this stuff in it and i'll have enough food the nice thing about the freeze-dried food is it's light and normally i'll have water as well i mean i have a jerry can full of water that i keep on my jeep as well so i'm good on the water but you can never really have enough water this stuff is light much lighter than a traditional mre again you can eat it unhydrated it's just not as good other things though like the fruit it's delicious just eating it just the way it is i mean you know you get some of the special k cereal that has these freeze-dried strawberries on it and it's really really good if you're freeze drying for just storage purposes which i do all the time because again i always have so much leftover food for my cooks you can do creative things like with the beef you can rehydrate it with beef broth like unsalted beef broth really really good adds even more beefy flavor this tastes just like freshly cooked beef so so stoked did i get into the freeze drying beer yet that'll be my next video anyway guys thanks for stopping by if you're not subscribed please hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell and thumb it up if you like it i hope you did please let me know if you want to see more freeze drive videos because i have fun doing this see you in the next video cheers you

Channel: Ballistic BBQ

Views: 146,096

Keywords: Ballistic BBQ, harvest right freeze dryer, How to freeze dry, freeze dried beef, freeze dried chicken, freeze dried fruit, MRE, Meals Ready to eat, emergency food, mre review, military food, steve1989, mre taste test, food, ration, army, camping, review, civilian, meal, survival, emergency, mci, tasting, eat, taste test, mreinfo, eaten, steve1989 mre taste test, packaged, modern, packet, how to rehydrate freeze dried food, Camping food, Food storage, vacuum sealer machine, Harvest Right review

Id: A_Wio4I-s-E

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021