We Will NEVER Freeze Our EXTRA EGGS Again!

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead well we have gotten so many requests for more information and more videos about the new harvest right freeze dryer that we just got for the homestead that today we thought we'd bring you something kind of fun something that shows you not only how to use the freeze dryer again but actually what to do with the food once you freeze dry it well we are quickly realizing how much freezer space we're gonna free up now that we're using this freeze dryer also we're realizing that we are going to be able to have fresh farm eggs all through the winter even if our hens stop laying today we're going to do something really fun we're going to freeze dry all the things that we need to make an omelette tomorrow morning for breakfast or brunch we're gonna freeze dry some raw eggs some diced onions and some diced green peppers all from the homestead these are our eggs these are our onions that we grew in 2020 diced up and put in the freezer now let me tell you something we grow lots of onions but we can't store them throughout the winter just you know in whole onions yeah so i dice them all and put them in freezer bags and all in the freezer i have like 20 or 30 of these in the freezer taking up a ton of freezer space well i can take these out and freeze dry them and then i have all of that freezer space left over for either other things or just maybe we won't have to use a freezer at all and then save that electricity right now once these are freeze-dried we won't have to keep these in the freezer anymore we'll be able to keep these either just in mylar bags or in mason jars and then we'll have a lot more space for that extra pig that we're raising this year in our freezer which is going to be awesome same goes for the green peppers we grow all the peppers that we need for the entire year over the summer and then i do the same thing i dice them and freeze them in freezer bags and they take up a lot of space so we're freeing up a bunch of freezer space like i said we're also going to be freeze drying some raw eggs from our chickens they will be shelf stable i have frozen my extra eggs in the past and it works i mean it works okay they're not fantastic but you guys freeze-dried eggs are like a miracle yeah they're amazing i can't wait to show you how easily it is to freeze dry them and then to reconstitute them and have them be like scrambled eggs it's it's amazing yeah it's amazing and each of these trays will hold a dozen and a half eggs so we've already freeze-dried probably 10 or 12 dozen eggs and we've freeze-dried a lot of eggs already because it's just one of those things that take them while you can get them and then be able to use them all year long is awesome exactly so our freeze dryer machine holds four of these trays we have the medium-sized freeze dryer yeah so like kevin said 18 eggs per tray we're going to use two trays for the eggs and then one of these quart size bags just completely filled with diced onions will go on one of the trays and then also the same thing a quart size bag of diced green peppers will go on the other tray that's we're going to fill the entire freeze dryer with today now we're not each going to have an omelette with 18 eggs well i am i'm hungry i'm going to be hungry well i'm not going to be that hot so let's get started and get these things going now with the harvest freeze dryer you have two options for when you're putting things in it you can either put things in just raw room temperature or you can put things in pre-frozen which is what we prefer to do now the reason that the reason that it's better or we think better to put things in pre-frozen is that it saves quite a bit of energy on the freeze dryer itself otherwise if you put things in just like say fresh vegetables if you just put those in it needs to then freeze everything first and then it can start the freeze drying process where if you pre-freeze everything you can put it in the freeze dryer and the freeze drying process can start that much faster so what we're going to do now is we're going to put everything on these trays and then we'll put these trays in one of our deep freezes and then a few hours from now maybe three or four hours from now once everything is frozen solid we'll actually take these trays and put them inside of the freeze dryer now the tricky thing about liquids and putting them into these trays is that it's very easy to tip them and have all your liquids like fallout or half of them anyway so what we're gonna do today is we're gonna put our dozen and a half eggs in each jar then we'll scramble them in here we'll whip them up with the whisk attachment of my immersion blender and then we'll take our jars and the trays out to the freezer and fill the trays in the freezer that way they're not going to spill all over the place between here and our freezer out in the [Music] garage [Music] well the eggs are all ready so we're gonna go put these all in the freezer get them nice and frozen then when we're ready to load up the freeze dryer we'll bring you along at that time well the eggs and the onions and the peppers have been in the freezer long enough now that they are frozen solid so it's time to load them into the freeze dryer now i've already turned the freeze dryer on probably 20 minutes ago or so so that it could cool down it cools down below freezing before you load the food in all right so we're going to open this up take off our insulator all right we're gonna get everything loaded in we're gonna start with the peppers now we'll put in our onions and then our two trays of eggs now that everything's loaded in we'll put this insulator back on the front now this around the front here is a big rubber gasket and when you close this door it seals good and tight against that rubber gasket so that it can create the vacuum inside of the machine so we just follow the instructions on the screen i know you guys probably can't see that because it's so bright but it says load food close the drain valve which we already did we hit continue and that's it the machine does the rest so we will leave this in here i'm guessing that this will take somewhere between 18 and 24 hours based on how long it's taken in the past to do these same things and we will see you guys back out here sometime tomorrow morning whenever they are finished we'll be able to take a look at everything and then actually try cooking with it well it's the next morning we just got done doing chores and the freeze dryer is beeping at me that it is finished so let's take a look inside make sure that everything is done and we'll start putting everything into jar so we can take it in the house and try to make some omelettes when the freeze dryer is completely done it'll tell you right on here exactly what to do in this case it says open the drain which we're going to do here that releases the vacuum pressure from inside the machine once you hear that done then we can move on now we'll open it up and we'll actually look at the stuff inside the food inside to make sure that it is completely dry if it's not we can hit more dry time we'll close the vent and it'll run for a few more hours but i think that this stuff is going to be done we've done all of these items before so i kind of know how long they're going to take [Music] so let's start let's look at the peppers oh they are definitely done look how awesome those look and the onions let's take the onions over to the table and get those in a jar i'm going to turn this off so you guys can hear me a little better [Music] there we go all right let's get these in a jar now i'm not going to show you guys what the eggs look like because i know that sarah is super excited to show you guys the eggs so i'm going to just do these all right so we're going to put these in court jars now i don't know if you guys can tell but i mean these are like super light and just like well let me i'll show you look how they just kind of fall apart like you could grind this into onion powder super easy because it's so like light and fluffy they smell awesome now for those of you who didn't see the first freeze dryer video that we did one of the main reasons we wanted to get a freeze dryer and one of the main things that we like about freeze drying versus just dehydrating which we do a lot of dehydrating and there is a good place for dehydrating but one of the nice things about freeze drying is it preserves nearly all of the nutrition in the food where when you can or you dehydrate you end up losing sometimes almost half of the nutritional value of the food when you're canning or dehydrating so freeze drying is definitely the way to go all right i wish you guys could smell these they smell so good now that's not to say that we are going to stop those other things we definitely will continue to do a ton of canning because honestly in the summer when we've got sometimes you know 50 to 100 pounds of tomatoes a day coming out of the garden the freeze dryer's not gonna keep up with that so there's still a lot of things that we're going to be canning and dehydrating and there still be some things we just plain out freeze so for us freeze drying is just another form of preservation uh it's not gonna replace any of the other other things that we've already done all right let's get these covered up one thing with freeze-dried food is that it can actually start to reabsorb moisture out of the air so like if on a really humid day it can actually start to suck some of that moisture back in out of the air and start rehydrating itself that way let's get the peppers out and put those in jars as well now the reason that today we're putting these in mason jars instead of mylar bags is because these are items that we're going to use pretty quickly we'll probably use these in the next few months so these aren't something we're putting away for for long-term storage these are just for short-term storage so putting them in the jars is going to be just fine i'm not even going to put oxygen absorbers in the jars that we're going to use first but i am going to show you what we're going to do with the jars that we're not going to use right away today these two jars we're gonna set aside because these are the ones we're gonna take these right in the house and use these to make our omelets but these two fuller jars that we're not gonna use right away today we're actually going to vacuum seal these two jars so here we have our food saver this is one of those vacuum sealer for the bags we've actually had this thing for probably 10 years or more we don't actually use it for this for the vacuum steel bags anymore the only reason we keep it around is for this attachment right here this thing is pretty cool this is the attachment that can actually vacuum seal jars so what you do is you put your your lid on top of the jar you put this thing over the top of the jar we'll turn this on then you pull that off and you can see that that is vacuum sealed and now these will stay in here there's no air there's no way that these will get rehydrated because we can keep this for quite a long time just like that so do the same thing with this other jar of onions then we'll be ready for sarah to show you guys the eggs here are the raw eggs you guys this is like so amazing they're completely dry isn't that amazing they're like completely crispy look at that totally flaky 100 dry it's like amazing so i'm going to actually be taking these out and putting them into my blender and we're going to blend them up into a powder and then we'll put them in a jar i think eggs are one of the most interesting things to freeze dry it's just kind of a mini miracle anything that is like a hundred percent liquid to turn into this powder it's just amazing this will be some really great security for us in the winter if our hens stop laying because it's cold and because there's a lot less light i'll be all set still with having our farm fresh well farm freeze-dried eggs over the winter we're just going to blend this up because it will really shrink the amount of space that these take up it'll be a wonderful powder really easy to work with also [Music] we're just going to put these in a jar easy as that just carefully pour them in look at the color of that you guys isn't that absolutely gorgeous because of those nice orange yolks from the free range chickens again so in this jar are 18 eggs a dozen and a half these we're going to keep out to use for our omelette but the second jar that i'm going to do is going to be vacuum sealed just like the onions and the peppers that kevin did so let it let's gather all of our things get into the house so that we can make these omelets all right well we're back in the house we've got our egg our peppers and our onions and we're going to start the process to reconstitute these and make them into our breakfast this is the fun part the eating part now what i'm going to do is something a little bit different than what sarah is going to do we're going to try these in two different ways what i'm going to do is first i'm going to put everything into a jar because what i want to know is how would this be if i wanted to take it camping or out in the woods with me or something like that so i'm going to make basically a meal in a jar and see how that turns out so for the eggs it's two tablespoons of the powder equals one egg so i'm gonna put four tablespoons in that would be the equivalent of two eggs and then i'm going to put a tablespoon of each of the onions and the peppers a good size tablespoon because what i want to know is if i were to just make something like this up you know basically have this in my backpack or with my gear for hunting or or whatever can i just carry this with me add some water when i'm out in the woods and then have breakfast build a fire right make a fire or whatever and have breakfast i mean because that's pretty awesome the other thing is you could make these up ahead of time for your kids uh whatever and just say you know have a little label on there that says add this much water let it sit for 10 minutes and then you you know ready to eat just cook it and you're ready to eat so i'm gonna try mine that way what are you gonna do with yours i'm gonna make an omelet i'm gonna make a two egg omelet so same as kevin uh i'm gonna use four tablespoons of eggs and then in a separate bowl because i don't want them all mixed together in a separate bowl i'm going to put a tablespoon of the peppers and a tablespoon of the onions because i'm gonna put the eggs down first and then put the onions and the peppers you know on the side like you would for an omelet so they're not all mixed together like scrambled eggs so essentially they're gonna taste the same but just a different way of cooking them okay now when it comes to reconstituting these the eggs you'll add two tablespoons of water per egg just like the two tablespoons of egg powder right so an egg is two tablespoons of powder two tablespoons of water right so you're gonna add four tablespoons of water which is really a quarter cup right and what we have found is that one tablespoon of the onions and one tablespoon of the peppers mixed together so two tablespoons they'll reconstitute really well with just one tablespoon of water so put that in there and i'm going to grab a spoon and mix those together and i'm going to basically add the same amount of water to my jar here except i'm going to just shake mine up so i'm gonna add five tablespoons of water to my jar here which if you really wanted to you could measure out even in a separate jar before you left home and then just mix the two jars together five the eggs are so weird because the eggs are so weird they're actually kind of like you know snotty you know like eggs are i don't mean to be gross but right they look just like they look like exactly like they were before we put them in the freeze dryer right so i've got mine here look at look at that it's like perfect breakfast in a jar so i'm gonna let that sit for about 10 minutes to let those peppers and onions reconstitute before we put it in a frying pan right i'm just gonna let mine sit here soak up the water and soon we'll be good to go okay it's been about i don't know five to ten minutes i lost count we're gonna do the omelette first here on the stove top we use cast iron i love it so we're just gonna use a regular cast iron pan i'm gonna use just a dab of our home render lard we just did this maybe last week or so if you're interested in learning about that make sure to check out that video so just maybe like a teaspoon get that melting i'm gonna add the egg this is just so amazing that that turned i mean it just rehydrated into eggs the way they normally look i'm just going to put that in the pan here [Music] i'm going to add salt and pepper now i'm going to flip it like a pancake and then i'm going to add my veggies to one side flip it over you know you could add cheese to that and some meat just today we're just doing the veggies flip that over let that get nice and hot in there let's put that on the plate and give it a try we're going to try this omelette but i want some sriracha sauce this is my homemade sriracha i did a video about that too do you want some hot sauce but i'm gonna try this omelette let's try okay wait wait ready ready um it's perfect now it's time for your scrambled eggs yeah these have been sitting now for quite a while so let's get these in the frying pan and see how they turn out with the scrambled eggs see if this is something we could take along on a road trip on camping whatever and have ready to eat all right got the frying pan heating up give this one last shake let's see how this does put a little salt and pepper on which honestly you could have already added right to the jar with the dry ingredients if you weren't gonna have salt and pepper with you on your camping trip i think this is really cool it's giving me lots of ideas for like meals in jars with the freeze dryer that i'm going to be able to make or even variations of this i mean if you had scrambled eggs with the veggies and then some freeze-dried chicken or freeze-dried ground meat in there i mean be perfect all right i think this is done let's get it on a plate and give it a try all right time to try the scrambled eggs now i don't really suspect they're going to be any different than the omelet because it's the same ingredients but again though they're perfect so they're just exactly the way they would be with fresh ingredients so that is pretty amazing we went from the fresh items turned it into the freeze-dried powder which now this if stored in a mylar bag or you know with an oxygen oxygen absorber and everything these eggs could last 25 to 30 years so we have our egg powder i mean same with these 25 to 30 years we could be eating an omelette 30 years from now from ingredients that we harvested off the farm today that is pretty awesome that is pretty awesome and it really gives us an additional way to preserve our harvest we work so hard to grow and raise as much food as we possibly can so to have another way to preserve our food for the long term rather than just really for the short term right canning dehydrating while two or three years sounds great um i want to be able to preserve my extra harvest for much longer right than that so this is a fantastic option i think the hardest part for me though is going to be actually putting stuff away and saying this is for a long term and not just eat it all right now because to me this is like this is like convenience food it sure is i mean this is like you know i'm thinking already i'm gonna go make up you know 10 of these in jars after this video and just have them sitting in the cabinet so when i want an omelette i just add water and make myself an omelet so you guys we hope you enjoyed this if you want to see more videos about the freeze dryer let us know we don't want to overload you guys with it but we're excited about it it is really something that we're excited to have if you want to know more about it we do have information in the description section below make sure you hit that little triangle it'll open up the description section check it out there also watch the first video that we did about it we talk about a lot of things for example the price of the machine itself and some of the obstacles for overcoming kind of the big price tag of it so watch that video as well if you haven't seen it you guys if you're enjoying our videos make sure that you hit the subscribe button below and as always please share our videos it's the best way for you to help us here on the homestead until next time thanks so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 581,932

Rating: 4.945446 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, Harvest Right Freezer Dryer, Harvest Right Freeze Drier, Freeze Drying foods, Freeze dried foods, freeze dried eggs

Id: UBcxzEScGJQ

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020