FREEZE DRIED MEAL RECIPES

 Before I put the cake into the freeze dryer, I was amazed at how moist the finished pumpkin spice cake was. While I expected a strong pumpkin flavor, I’m happy and more than a little surprised to share that the predominant flavor in this cake was spice. The pumpkin flavoring was so subtle, it would have been fine to serve as it was to my family and they never would have known it had the hated pumpkin in it.

 While I’m talking tough, I actually really did like this cake after it was cooked. I was so surprised by the flavor that I offered a piece to all the kids and didn’t tell them what was in it. They all liked it and now they’re asking for pumpkin flavored stuff. Ugh, but also, hmmm now I want to try more (just no pie!).

 Wow, look at that coloring. You can see there’s no moisture in these cake slices. They were very light in both color and weight. Their initial crumbling was controlled as well. The ground burger coloring changed like this too.

 They reminded me of an untidy biscotti. I gave the small bite sized ones to the kids to try and they loved it. I even ended up giving some of the bars in the big size to them as well. The freeze drying process seemed to take away even more of the pumpkin flavor. By the time I put these into the Mylar bags, they tasted like spice cake cookies. I even went and bought more pumpkin pie filling. It was almost as embarrassing as when I buy imitation vanilla extra – I’m a baking snob. Let’s be honest.

 Many people think it’s next to impossible to do the freeze drying for themselves. This is far from factual. Freeze drying at home is made easy by Harvest Right. They sell three different sizes of freeze-drying machines that do everything in the machine – except prep and package. That’s up to you.

 For all intents and purposes, here at Freeze Drying Mama we use the medium sized freeze dryer. You can check out the sizes offered at Harvest Right here. What this machine does is first freeze the items on stainless steel trays to -41 degrees or lower. This takes about 10 hours or so. Then a vacuum pump turns on and creates a vacuum inside the drum. This is the drying stage and will vacillate the heat of the tray up and down to a pretty warm temperature. This makes the frozen items release any water in them in vapor form. The vacuum sucks the moisture to the drum and this collects in ice form on the inner circle of the drum. Then there’s the final dry which is essentially the same thing, but with a time associated with it.

 In our family, we all seek natural ways to take care of our bodies and our health. Freeze dried raspberry powder is known for multiple health benefits to include:

 Antioxidants, such as Vitamins C and E, selenium, beta carotene, lutein, lycopene, and zeaxanthin, and let’s not forget about flavonoids! Antioxidants help the body eliminate toxic substances that come from external sources like unhealthy foods and pollution.

 Fiber. Who doesn’t need fiber!? I love fiber and on keto, I need all the fiber I can get. Fiber can help manage or prevent health issues such as blood pressure, obesity, cholesterol levels, heart disease, and stroke. As most everyone knows, fiber helps with digestion, cancer prevention, and helping with diabetes.

 After all the healthy benefits are covered, you have to go with the biggest reason to love raspberry powder – the taste it brings to whatever it’s added to. Rhonda, my mother-in-law, uses raspberry powder in smoothies and other things. In fact, she contributed the images and the information for this post! I just get to try the product when she’s done. Lucky me!

 Freeze dried raspberry powder is very versatile. Add your powder to dishes like pancakes, frosting for flavor and color, cake mixes, waffles, breads like banana bread, cookies, and like I said above, smoothies! Rhonda also likes to add the freeze dried raspberry powder to hot chocolate, ice cream, kefir, yogurt and more (sometimes it needs a little sweetening).

 Freeze drying raspberries into a powder turned out to be a necessity. If you could only see the abundance of berries in Rhonda’s garden, you’d understand why this was important for her to do. She started out by pureeing raspberries in 3 1/4 cup portions (enough for a batch of freezer jam) and put them in FoodSaver bags in the freezer. These bags lie flat and freeze nicely, stacking in beautiful packets that are ready to be used at a later time.

 Even with Rhonda’s generosity in giving many of her frozen bags of raspberry puree away to family, she still found that the ones she kept at home were taking up valuable freezer real estate. After she got the freeze dryer, she decided to free up some space by freeze drying some of the puree into raspberry powder.

 Out of the eight blocks of frozen puree that Rhonda put in, most of them were completed after about 35 hours (she selected not frozen, liquid before selecting start).

 A few needed a little more drying time which she could tell because she touched the tray and found some spots to still be cool. Something that dense (with all the seeds) needed to turn the blocks about halfway through because the bottoms weren’t getting dried.

 The blocks freeze dried solid and then she put them into a large mixing bowl and used a masher to pulverize the block into the fine powder.

 You can see the beautiful color in this powder. It’s not hard to see why you would want to use this for any number of items as stated above.

 Jam would be a great way to reconstitute raspberry powder. Just add sugar, lemon juice, and a small amount of water to see make a jam from the powder. That’s one thing that is always delicious to have on fresh bread and with all the raw wheat we have, we’ll need something to eat on it.

 Also, to utilize the nutrients, minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants, it would be a good idea to add this to a jar of honey. Use a 1:1 ratio to make a preventative homemade multivitamin source. Who wouldn’t want to have raspberry flavored honey to swallow instead of those crazy horse-sized pills we try to swallow? I know I’d vastly prefer it!

Freeze Dry Cheesecake

 When you’re packing this, you might try measuring out a set amount you would use as serving sizes. 1/4 cup servings are great sizes. Then store them in smaller bags with smaller oxygen absorbers. These ones I’m recommending have a bottom that will stand up without having to lean something.

 If you have Mylar bags coming out your ears, you can try jars or separating sections into your Mylar bags with your sealer. Don’t forget to use smaller oxygen absorbers in the made pockets.

 One of my favorite places to get Freeze Dried Raspberry Powder (before I had a freeze dryer) was at Harmony House Foods. Click here to visit Harmony House Foods, Inc.

 What are some ways you can think of to utilize freeze dried raspberry powder? We would love some suggestions! What do you think about this option?

 One thing that is hard to store in food storage, is meat. We can “can” all day long or pack our freezers until we’re blue in the face, but still that meat will only stay good for so long and only in a specific status. Freeze dried rotisserie chicken, however, tends to be a different kind of a “status.”

 Here’s what I mean. When you have canned chicken, it’s going to be saved in the liquid for an indeterminate amount of time and that doesn’t make for tasty fajitas or casseroles. Plus, the lifetime of meat in a jar or a can isn’t as long as it could be.

 What about frozen meat? Sure, it stays good between 5 and 6 years (we push it even further, but I don’t recommend it). But what happens when your electricity goes out like it has recently in California for mandatory power outages? Your freezers can’t stay on forever. Not to mention, you can’t pack your freezer with you when you go camping or hiking. What if you’re going to move? Let me tell you, we’ve moved two elks worth of meat from Las Vegas back home to north Idaho and that was stressful.

 If you have the capabilities, the best way to store your meat for the future, for camp outs, for hiking, etc is to freeze dry the meat. What a weird possibility, right?

 We do more than just chicken when we freeze dry meat. We do ground burger, steaks, roast, pork chops, eggs (we count these as meat!) and more!

 The taste of these chickens is always amazing. They season these birds and they’re overflowing with flavor. My favorite part is that they’re less than $5 a bird. Every time I go, I grab three or more more than what I need for a couple dinners that week.

 This is what these chickens look like. Their skin is tasty, but I don’t recommend freeze drying it. There is a lot of fat in the skin. Freeze drying straight fat is difficult to accomplish, if not impossible because of the structure and components of the fat and what is needed to accomplish the freeze drying.

 I take the bone off the meat from each chicken, starting with the breast and removing as much as I can from every facet that I can reach. The kids fight over who gets to finish off the chicken meat that I don’t take. I usually leave a little bit here and there for them to find. They like to tease me and say “Look, Mom! I found another piece.” It’s pretty fun.

 The size of the meat chunks usually isn’t too big, but as you can see it isn’t small either. I tear off the chunks and make sure they’re manageable in size. You can see the sizes in the pictures here. I also make sure I have adequate space between them but not too much because I only need space for air and vapor. I don’t need to get anything else in there.

 Rotisserie chicken in the medium machine I got from Harvest Right, four trays and three chickens from Costco (which I’ve found to be a little bit bigger than the birds at most grocery stores including Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club) take 24 hours from start to finish. I don’t pre-freeze these.

 Sometimes, when I’m pushing to get four chickens in, it can take 26 hours, but that’s not too much when I usually need a little bit longer because of sleeping or something else. I start these loads about five PM – around dinner time because that’s when I get back from errands.

 The rotisserie chicken is light and has the feeling of holding a piece of Styrofoam. You can eat them right out of the Mylar bags or you can reconstitute them slowly to hold onto the tenderness of the meat with water or whatever liquids you are cooking with.