Making and Using Vegetable Powders

good morning and welcome to rosebread homestead i am so excited this morning this is a video that many of you have been waiting several weeks for it is how to make and use vegetable powders and so the reason that i'm so excited about this video is that vegetable powders are an amazingly wonderful way to add to food security and we're going to talk about all that in just a moment when we come back [Music] in my research in preparation for this video i went of course to google my favorite go-to place and i wanted to find out what the most nutrient-rich foods were and aside from salmon and liver vegetables were listed as the most nutrient dense foods and so i wanted to know what the top 10 vegetables were and there are oh my goodness a dozen lists of the top 10 vegetables in terms of the nutrients that they contain but pretty much every list started with spinach and then carrots and then broccoli and i'm taking a time out next is kale and green beans and swiss chard then asparagus and potatoes and beets and tomatoes notice our beet jar is empty we're going to remedy that in just a moment and so the the lists vary somewhat but i'm going to leave it to you to look up each of these individual vegetables and find out exactly what those nutrients are most of them contain a lot of vitamins some even contain a daily supply of this vitamin or that vitamin so these are really nutrient dense foods now when we powder them any of you who have done powdering before if you've either freeze dried or dehydrated them and then powdered them you notice that a whole dehydrator full of spinach powders down to about a fourth of a cup and so all of those nutrients are then concentrated in just a small amount of powder and so in terms of food security having these powders on hand in times of emergency in times when the grid goes down for any extended period of time and we are left with just what we have in our cabinets having powdered vegetables provides us an amazing degree of versatility and so i'm going to kind of show you some of that as we move forward now in order to powder vegetables you need to have an appliance that will either freeze dry or dehydrate or another way of dehydrating vegetables you can use your oven if you live in a hot dry climate you can use the sun but the vegetables need to be brought to a point where they contain less than 10 percent moisture and so most of the mass of these vegetables is water and the water is driven out by whatever drying process we're going to use so that is the first thing and if you dehydrate or put it out in the sun or use your oven the vegetables are going to end up being pretty hard if you use a freeze dryer they're going to be much easier to powder one of the reasons that i like to show both dehydrating and freeze drying vegetables in the same video is because i know that everybody cannot afford a freeze dryer they are darned expensive and jim and i are in our 70s and it took us that long to get a freeze dryer we waited about five years and so it's you know people say i have to save up for those and so we get that and i don't want anyone to feel left out when they watch our videos because they don't have the same equipment that we do and so i really appreciate it when when people in our comments say thank you for showing both ways because i know that it can be daunting when um you're just presented with one way of doing things and i like to have options anyway there was a little discussion on one of our videos about freeze drying being the only way to preserve any food value all the other ways don't preserve any food value and that is absolutely not true freeze drying saves most of the nutrients but right under that is dehydrating and under that is canning and i do all three because i like to have options and so whatever you have just use it the other thing that you're going to need is something to pulverize the dried vegetables now i have a vitamix and i've had this one for jim and i were trying to calculate the other day i think we got it pretty pretty early in our marriage and so it's probably 15 or 18 years old it's old in terms of how long kitchen appliances last but i'm very practical and i'm not going to get anything new because there are a lot of new and exciting ways on the market now that you can use to pulverize to powder your vegetables so whatever you have and can use then use it and it would be great if those of you that have things other than a vitamix would put down in the comments what it is you use to powder vegetables with so that others can learn from you because i don't know all of the different ways but i know that some of you do in fact what i would really like to do is to make this video a big shareathon because the things that i'm going to show you today are not super unique there are lots and lots of ways to use powdered vegetables so let's share and let's teach each other how to best use these vegetable powders okay so it has taken me weeks and weeks to get all of these vegetables powdered and i know that some of you were getting quite impatient but dang it it takes a long time to do this and it is not especially labor intensive it's just time intensive to let everything dry and then you have to do two or three batches to even get a pipe's worth of powder and so it has taken a long time but i'm so thrilled to have these vegetable powders and begin using them now i saved a couple i've done we've done several videos on um dehydrating and freeze drying eggs and we did that with broccoli we did that with i don't know two or three other vegetables so that you could see how we do that now one thing that we didn't do was beets and these beets have been freeze dried but the story about these beets is that these used to be canned beets on my pantry shelf and they were like five years old now they were still good but i decided i was just going to try to take those canned beets and freeze dry them to see what would happen they turned out just fabulous not only are they beautiful to look at and nice and airy they are also fabulous just as a snack jim and i both ate several of these be nice to take on a trip in a little baggie and have a veggie snack that is loaded with let's see let me look at my beat list here vitamin k good for blood pressure fiber heart health so just think about this while you go on a trip but what we're going to do right now is we're going to powder these beets so i just put them in my vitamix and this is the container that is good for dry foods vegetable powders are like gold you do not want to lose even one little iota of that powder after how hard you have worked to do it and i was getting a lot of powder up inside the lid that i couldn't um get all of it out and then one of our viewers gave me a marvelous tip to just put a little piece of plastic wrap like that over the top which keeps the powder down in the container rather than coming up in the lid so that was a great tip that i learned from that person a little bit on the plastic but nothing up in the lid and all this lovely beet powder down in the bottom so we're gonna get this jar started now i'm going to finish doing this off camera because you've seen me do it once you don't need to see me do it 13 times so i'll finish this off camera and we'll be back beets are finished and i'm just taking this little it's actually a paint brush but i it's my food brush that i use for basting things and i'm knocking all of the powder down to the bottom and then i'm brushing everything off to get the last little bit of this beet now i'm going to do that finish that off camera and then i wanted to show you these tomatoes now the tomatoes i'm also going to do because i need more tomatoes i find that tomatoes is one of the most used uh powders that that i have now when i dehydrated these tomatoes i did them in slices unlike when if you have watched our video on sun dried tomatoes you notice that i used half tomatoes just cut them only in half these i sliced and dehydrated they dehydrated much faster and so i'm also going to powder these because i need more tomato powder and one of the things that i discovered with these and i posted this on my facebook page and people just loved it and that is that even these dried tomatoes like this i did a tomato sandwich with some fresh baked homemade bread spread with mayo and then just put these dehydrated tomatoes in the sandwich and my gosh it was fantastic and the great thing was that the tomatoes were not wet to soggy the bread and so it worked out really great so it wouldn't work for everything but it sure did work for that but i'm going to powder all of these and then we'll be back when that is done so here is the powdered tomatoes i didn't quite do the whole quarter i did about half of the tomatoes now if you notice there's lumps in this and when i touch the lumps they powder but this powder isn't really free-flowing like this tomato powder when i twirl it like this it free-flows on a powder if it does not free flow like this has moisture in it and that happened to me before with actually with these tomatoes right here and so even after i had powdered them they it was like this it's still sticky and it does not flow and so i just poured the powder right back on a tray in my dehydrator and dried it again for another couple of hours because you want your powders to be very very dry and when you twirl the jar it should free flow i kept this in a bowl separately because i don't want to mix it with that other one and i'm going to use this in just a little bit anyway so i'm going to set that aside right now so let's learn how to use veggie powders and again i don't have every way in the universe to use veggie powders but i have used them in some things one of the things that you want to remember and by the way with kale jim and i just don't like kale and because we don't like kale i'm not going to make powder out of it because we wouldn't ever use it and so be sure that you're practical in how you approach powdering vegetables or anything else make sure that you only do for your family what your family is going to eat so one of the ways that i have used it is in making deviled eggs now i don't know that you can tell this but i added some celery powder to the egg yolk filling so it does look a little bit more green than usual but you can't even taste it and say oh that's celery powder but rather what you taste is just you know celery has such a bright fresh taste and it lifts flavors a little bit and so that's exactly what happens when i put celery powder in deviled eggs now another thing that i used it for and this was purely experimental i made some little buns and you can see that these are quite green these are spinach and onion buns and so i used a couple of tablespoons and i just used our basic bread dough we have a video on first lessons in bread making and that first video gives a recipe and that's what i used for these buns and i just added a couple of tablespoons of spinach powder and then our onion powder and i have back here some extras that i have powdered that go into my recipes and so this is onion powder and i made that from freeze-dried onions this is cheese also from freeze-dried cheese this is a chicken bone broth and this is another one that needs to flow very freely or you've got too much moisture in there or too much fat and if that's the case then you may want to refrigerate it but this is my chicken bone broth and oh my gosh what exciting things i can do now because i have powdered my own chicken broth and then this is the celery powder and it's not one of the top 10 veggies it's still very nutritious and i love celery because i use it in so many things and so i used it here so here i use the spinach powder right here and then i use the onion powder and these are tomato now i used a couple of tablespoons of this uh powdered tomato here and you can hardly see the difference if i were to break this open you just can see that the inside is not super super white but it doesn't look unlike a regular roll would look now with the spinach obviously you can tell something green has been added to this dough but this is a savory bun would be great with a savory sandwich so that's another way that i've used it this morning i fixed pancakes for us and unbeknownst to the family i added about three tablespoons of carrot powder now you want to you you want to choose the powder that works with the food and because carrots are a little bit sweet i knew that it would work with pancakes i'm not sure that i would use broccoli powder for instance in pancakes but here i saved some of the batter so you could see with about three tablespoons of the carrot powder it just turned the batter just a little bit slightly pale orange but once you break open the pancakes you can't even tell it just looks like a regular pancake and so there are advantages for that if your family is averse to eating veggies you can just slip powders in and give them the vegetable vitamins that are needed i we had one viewer say as mothers we have to be tricky and and that may be the case in your household you have to just kind of slip things in and that works just fine too and we had these this morning with the plum syrup that we made in a video that just recently aired so um this is a great way to add vegetable powders and then of course is pasta and so i made three different types of pasta this of course is spinach this is carrot and this is tomato and so we're having a big family dinner tonight with my daughter and my son and his fiancee who are living with us and then my daughter and her family which includes my grandson and my granddaughter-in-law and one-year-old otto who has just started to walk so we're going to be doing homemade pasta for that now i need to get these back in the freezer because they are thawing so i'll be back i just wanted to remind you that with the pasta when we did our asparagus week for three different videos one of the things that i showed was how to powder asparagus and then um how to make asparagus pasta so that's another flavor that is good with pasta not all of these would be good with pasta i think but then it's just kind of a personal choice so the more savory ones the spinach and the broccoli those would be really good just adding to soups and stews and you know just whatever you feel is a good match for whatever it is that you are making now i wanted to show you one thing that i love about the tomato powder and even though this has a little bit of extra moisture in it it won't matter for what we're going to be doing here and so this is of the fresh tomato powder and i'm just going to add some water to it and stir it until we have it the consistency of tomato paste so if you have tomato powder on your shelf and you're all out of tomato paste look what you can do this makes great tomato paste so here we have the really thick tomato paste and this just tastes like those fresh tomatoes it's really really good then you can take the tomato paste and you can thin it down a little bit more and guess what you can create here and there we have a pretty darn good tomato sauce now what can we do with that tomato sauce well i have about a cup of water in here so i'm just going to stir in a bit of the tomato sauce it's about perfect all right going to test this a little ice in the glasses and i could add a splash of lemon juice and a little bit of salt great and so you have that versatility with with the tomato powder now one last thing that you can do and i've worked pretty hard on this part is to make jars of instant soup so this is creamy asparagus soup now this is powdered milk this is asparagus powder and this is potato powder for the thickening up of the soup and then on the top are spices if you can see that right there and then i made this little hang tag and made it all fancy and so what a perfect gift this would be uh in using the uh powdered veggies now this is a teaser because we're going to wind this video up right now but our next video which is the last of our powdered vegetable series is i have made up four different recipes for these powdered soups and to my knowledge they are original recipes and so i'm going to um present those four instant soups to you that you can put together these luscious creamy soups just by using vegetable powders and here is a hint in some of them we will be using the powdered in fact i think in all of them we'll be using the powdered chicken broth because you would add this amount of stuff these ingredients to a quart of your home canned chicken bone broth you could even use water but broth is much better and then you would have a a quart of soup for your family so these would be so fun to have already made up so that you could just pull these down from the shelf as well so this is our next video and i'll show you four different recipes i love vegetable powders i love the aspect of self-reliance and food security that is involved with vegetable powders it helps us prepare for emergency situations and it also adds a great deal of nutrition to our regular cooking to help the health and welfare of our families so thanks for joining us for this fun activity and i hope it's been useful to you and we will see you with our next video

Channel: RoseRed Homestead -- That "Woman with a Gadget"

Views: 325,330

Keywords: spinach powder, tomato powder, potato powder, broccoli powder, asparagus powder, beet powder, carrot powder

Id: YBqRYeS2uyo

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021