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Simple Farmhouse Life
261. Freeze Drying: The Food Preservation Method Every Homestead Kitchen Needs | Carolyn of Homesteading Family
00:54:18
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- [00:01]
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- [00:59]
Carolyn Thomas
Com cocktail 98% nutrition retention in freeze dried food. It's actually locking in the nutrition for extended periods of time because it's locking in that nutrition. What it's doing is it's locking in the flavor. You end up with a product that most of the time looks nearly identical to the fresh version of the food. It is very close, but it's not exact. But it's way closer than something like a dehydrated food and definitely way closer than something like a canned or anything that's been heated.
- [01:30]
Lisa
My name is Lisa, mother of eight and creator of the blog and YouTube channel Farmhouse on Boom. On this podcast I like to talk about simplifying your life so you can live out your priorities. I help you learn how to cook from scratch and decorate on a budget through this podcast and my courses Simple Sourdough in the Simple Sewing series. I also help people reach their goals from home through my business courses, Create your blog Dream and YouTube Success Academy. I will leave links to these resources in the show notes and description box below. Now let's get into the show Foreign welcome back to the Simple Farmhouse Life Podcast. Today I'm having on Carolyn Thomas from Homesteading Family. If you are in the homesteading world or you like to watch things like that on YouTube or listen to podcasts, you've probably already heard of Carolyn and her husband Josh. They also run the School of Traditional Skills and I did a fermenting class on there. But we're going to chat today about freeze drying and before you click away you might think, oh, I already know. All you do is you cut stuff up, put it on the little freeze dryer and press the button. That's what I thought, too, but there's actually a lot more to know about it, or if you think, okay, this probably isn't worth it, there's probably not much that freeze drawing has to offer me in my homestead. Carolyn actually thought the same thing when she first got into it, and she found herself very wrong. So there was a lot of things in this episode that I learned that I really honestly already thought that I knew. So it's a very valuable listen. Carolyn, thank you so much for coming on. We are going to talk about a topic that has been very close to you for several years, but even more so in this last year because you've written a book on freeze drying. So tell us a bit about yourself for those who don't know you and your new book.
- [03:21]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me on. It's great to get to be here and get to hang out with you. So my name's Carolyn. I run homesteading family with my husband Josh, and that's where we do a lot of education on homesteading topics. And one of the things that I really spend a lot of time on is food preservation. And part of that's because I'm up here in the very far north of Idaho. So we have a really short growing season, which means that if we want to eat our homegrown food year round, we're doing a lot of food preservation to make that actually stretch that whole amount of time. So years ago, when I first heard about freeze drying, I really thought it was a gimmick. I was totally skeptical. I was like, oh, my goodness, it's. It's just another thing that they want you to buy. It's just a marketing thing. It's a fad. It's going to go away in no time at all, you know, and here I am teaching all these traditional preservation skills. So to me, I was just like, like, you know, this isn't going to last. And that's what I thought, honestly, for quite a few years. I just really thought it was a fad. I thought, you know, we've been. We've been preserving food for thousands of years as a human, right, without an expensive gadget like this. And we've gotten along just fine. So I really didn't think that freeze drying was something that was going to be around for a while. So fast forward a few years and Harvest, right, reached out to me and asked me to take a. A freeze dryer in exchange for doing some honest review videos and I actually countered them. I was like, you know, I'm not gonna be nice just because this isn't me. It's gonna be a seriously honest review. And I honestly thought, Lisa, that this was my moment to tell everybody they didn't need a freeze dryer.
- [05:18]
Lisa
There are people that are still doing that. But yeah, they obviously harvest, right, was confident when they agree to this.
- [05:24]
Carolyn Thomas
They totally must have had a lot of confidence in their product because I straight out was telling them, like, I don't see this going the direction you want it to go. And. And they were like, okay, we'll just try it. And I said, okay, well, if you're good with that, then, you know, then I will. And so I got it, and I had not really done a lot of research in it because honestly, I did not see myself using this as a preservation method. So when I got it, I did not even realize that I was going to need some special electrical setup in the house, which you do if you get certain sizes, machines, you need, you know, certain dedicated circuits or different things based on the size of your machine. And so when we got it, we went to go set it up, and we're like, okay, this is not something we're just going to plug in and push go. We actually need to call the electrician. And so by the time I got this machine set up, it was like January, and there is not a whole lot coming out of my north Idaho garden in January. And so I was like, what am I even going to do with this thing? But I had some onions, they were getting soft, and so I. I said, okay, well, I'll just. I'll just run some onions through it. And I ran those onions through, and for one, it was. It was really easy. I had to give it that right off the bat. It was a couple pushes of a button and I was like, right, okay. That was pretty straightforward, really simple. And then I got them into the kitchen, though, and that's where I really started to get interested because they were so easy to use in the kitchen. I didn't even have to rehydrate the onions. They were already chopped. I just, like threw them into the pan. And it was amazing. It was so great. But I really still was kind of had the skepticism of, like, you know, I'm. I'm holding on to my preform judgment really hard. Like, I can't believe that this thing's that handy. This must have just been really lucky. I got the one thing that was really easy to use, right?
- [07:22]
Lisa
The best freeze dryer vegetables Yeah, I.
- [07:25]
Carolyn Thomas
Just stumbled on it. Right. And so the next thing that happened was we ended up with, like, I can't remember, it was eighty to a hundred laying hens that year that were all coming into their first lay right at the spring flush. And so we were no joke, bringing in over 80 eggs every single day into the kitchen, which is, whew.
- [07:45]
Lisa
Like, even for a large family, that's impossible to keep up with.
- [07:49]
Carolyn Thomas
It really is. It's like, wow. I. I don't know that I thought through that side of this.
- [07:54]
Lisa
Yeah, I didn't think through for our number of chickens either. Yeah.
- [07:57]
Carolyn Thomas
And so, you know, I love water glassing. I love doing all these different things with eggs to preserve them, but there's only so many five gallon buckets of eggs that I can have laying around my basement. And so I thought, hey, the freeze dryer, let's try that. And, oh, I loved it. It was so fast. It was so easy. But the really cool thing was is that nobody in the house could taste the difference between a freeze dried egg that had been rehydrated and a fresh egg. And that, to me, was like gold. That was so amazing. So that's where I really started to go, okay, this is a thing. And then the raspberries hit. It got to be raspberry harvest season a couple months later. And I loved the raspberries so much that I started feeling a little bitter about having to make this decision of do I put a batch of eggs in or do I put a batch of raspberries in? I didn't want to have to make the decision. I just wanted them both. So I actually turned around and I purchased a whole nother freeze dryer because I was like, I love this and it's giving me the best quality food on the other side. I just really like that. So now I've gone on and I've even purchased a third freeze dryer. You know, it's just been something I still can. I definitely still ferment, I still dehydrate. I use all of the methods, but I really find myself using that freeze dryer more and more.
- [09:20]
Lisa
Yeah. So, like, you first thing you did was onions. Yeah. What was your method of preserving an onion in the past? Like, what would you have done?
- [09:28]
Carolyn Thomas
Okay. So I always start with just cellaring them. Right. You know, just curing them and letting them sit. And a lot of years I can make that get me all the way through to the next onion season. Okay. But not all the time. So, you know, even with a freeze dryer at my fingertips. I'm always going to opt towards like the most practical option. And if it's putting them in a basket in my basement and that's all I have to do, then that's what I'm going to do. So that's usually what I do. But you experience this point some years where either they didn't cure great or something happened with the GR growing and they're not curing and storing as well or just the basement's warmer, you know, it's not as cold of a year and so they're starting to sprout or they're starting to soften. Then usually what I'd be doing is, you know, maybe canning them into a French onion soup. Definitely doing some dehydrating, you know, so those are kind of the go to methods. Inevitably I end up just losing a bunch of them because I just can't keep up with it.
- [10:28]
Lisa
Yeah. So a lot of those require more time, more space. You mentioned dehydrating. What's the difference there? I think a lot of people think that maybe they're very similar. Freeze drying and dehydrating.
- [10:39]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, yeah, they, they do in some ways seem similar because you for both of them end up with a dry product. So in both ways you're kind of dehydrating. But with a dehydrator, what you're usually doing is you're adding a little bit of heat and you're blowing air over something over a long period of time and that is evaporating off the moisture. In a freeze dryer, what you're doing is you're freezing the food to a very low temperature. Think like negative 40 degrees. And then in that very frozen state, a vacuum pump kicks on, which is essentially decreasing the pressure inside. So you're getting an extremely low pressure environment. In fact, it's so low pressure it's like being in outer space, space type of lows pressure. And we know, you know, if you've studied canning at all, those of you guys who are listening, you know that as you move up in altitude, the point of boiling decreases. Your temperature at boiling actually decreases. So what we're doing when we drop that pressure down that low is we're dropping the boiling point of the food to a place where it is going straight from frozen to evaporation. So you're missing the heat point altogether. You're never heating that food. What that does in freeze drying, and that's a process called sublimation. For those of you guys who are, you know, aware of that. That scientific principle, what that means that it does is it is holding the cellular structure of the food almost completely intact. Not 100%, but much more than if you're heating the food to evaporate off the moisture. So that means a couple things. One, it means that you super lock in the nutrition of the food. So that's why they're talking in the 98% nutrition retention in freeze dried food. I actually dug into all the studies to see are these just fancy marketing claims or is this for real? And it is for real. It's actually locking in the nutrients, nutrition for extended periods of time, better than any other food preservation method that we have, except maybe fermenting, which actually increases some of your vitamins for a short period.
- [13:06]
Lisa
But it's short term. So when you're looking for that long term. And it also requires more space.
- [13:11]
Carolyn Thomas
Yes, yeah, definitely requires more space. And, but it also, because it's locking in that nutrition, what it's doing is it's locking in the flavor, which you know, real flavor comes from real nutrition. Right. And so when you're locking that in, that means you end up with a product that most of the time looks nearly identical to the fresh version of the food visually. So it doesn't shrink down like a dehydrated food. It keeps its bulk, it rehydrates to something that is much closer to the fresh version than a dehydrated food ever would. Because those cellular walls are still intact. It just rehydrates in its original form, which is great. It's never going to be exactly like fresh. Like, you know, don't let anybody lie to you and say it's exactly the same. It is very close, but it's not exact. But it's way closer than something like a dehydrated food and definitely way closer than something like a canning.
- [14:11]
Lisa
Right.
- [14:11]
Carolyn Thomas
Anything that's been heated. But yeah, so that, that probably represents the biggest differences between dehydrating and freeze drying is just that that's the way that cellular structure stays intact.
- [14:25]
Lisa
Yeah. So the advantages, obviously you're getting the nutrition, the freshness with it tasting almost the same. And then the storage aspect. So you were saying before when you would bring in 80 eggs a day or whatever, you would have to do water glassing, which is great. It's very simple, it's very easy, effective method. But all the eggs, you know, they stay in their full egg form with the shell, they can break. They, you know, with, with freeze drying. What I think I pack like maybe four dozen eggs into a Half gallon jar, something like that. Am I, am I remembering that right? I haven't done it this year.
- [15:02]
Carolyn Thomas
When, when you're freeze drying or when you're water.
- [15:04]
Lisa
Freeze drying. Freeze drying, yeah. Right. Or how many are you fitting in a half gallon jar?
- [15:09]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, it's a lot. It's about an egg turns into about a t. Two tablespoons of powder. And so, you know, you start doing that math and what that's like eight tablespoons. Yeah. Or eight.
- [15:23]
Lisa
You're not. Yeah, you're just cracking them in and putting them on the freezer. I think it was something like that. Whereas like with a water glass thing, I think a half gallon jar. So it must hold way more than that because it ends up. Yeah, it ends up taking up just way, way less space. So that, that seems like a really big advantage. I mean, for most people, having storage space is a problem for preserving.
- [15:45]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, it really is. And the other thing with that is that, you know, when you have these buckets of water glassed eggs or limed eggs, either of those and you, you want to move them, you know, it's a problem. You're either going to break them, which happens often and causes all sorts of problems with those, or they're just so heavy you can't move them around. When you go pick up a jar of freeze dried eggs or even a bucket of freeze dried eggs, you know, they're very light because all of the moisture is out of them. So it, it really gives you a lot of storage flexibility when, you know, freeze drying does in general. But definitely with the eggs, it gives you a lot of flexibility. Now I've got to say I lost about 50% of the eggs that I freeze dried that first run, you know, first couple runs of eggs, because like I said, I hadn't really done a lot of research and it's hard to find good information on freeze drying. It's. It's actually frustrating.
- [16:46]
Lisa
It's still very new for the home, you know, gardener, and it really is.
- [16:50]
Carolyn Thomas
And you know, most of the information that you can find is in these freeze drying Facebook groups. I have no idea what it is about people who freeze dry and people who are on Facebook and like the cross section of the two. But they're not nice. They're actually really.
- [17:08]
Lisa
That's just Facebook in general. There's also like, I heard it called like a gatekeeper, where like people who are into a certain thing, almost like you can't join us here. And so we're gonna share like we know and you can't anyways. Yeah, yeah, it's not. Nice place.
- [17:22]
Carolyn Thomas
Not a nice place. And honestly, I was like, I would end up in tears over trying to, you know, I don't know, I guess I'm pretty sensitive. I don't like people being mean to each other. Hate what. Like, you can be mean to me, but I hate watching somebody else get attacked. And like, people were asking these very innocent questions of like, how do I do this? And they were getting attacked. So anyways, it was hard to even want to do the research into finding out the right way to do it. And what I found out is I was not sufficiently making sure that my eggs were completely dry and I wasn't packaging them correctly. And so, you know, for me, that was a lot of eggs before I real. I think I had like 200 quart jars of egg powder. And as I started going through them, I was like, maybe a third of them were bad and that.
- [18:12]
Lisa
Were they moldy or were they smelling.
- [18:14]
Carolyn Thomas
Rotten or what was the deal? They didn't have enough moisture to mold in them, but they had gotten enough moisture for the bacteria to kick back in and, you know, for them to start aging.
- [18:25]
Lisa
I think that's happened to me before and I just assumed that I. So we had one time we were gonna. We did like a big bulk freeze drying egg day and we had lots of eggs that we didn't label properly. And so we are kind of just smelling each one individually, you know, like you do. And unless you're more organized than me, in which case you don't. But, you know, sometimes the kids will find a pile in the barn and it's like, well, we got to check these. But I think we. I just assume that maybe like one or two bad ones got in there, but maybe that's not what it was.
- [18:57]
Carolyn Thomas
Right? Yeah, I, you know, you do. There is skill in freeze drawing as much as it's like, hey, just push a button. It's easy. It's simple and easy. But you do have to have some skills. And where that really comes in is I feel like there's three places where you really have to know what you're doing when it's freezing. One is knowing how to pre treat food. Because there are foods that really need to be pre treated in order for them to turn out great or in order for them to rehydrate Great. Pre treatment with freeze drying is always optional if you're okay with subpar food. So in, in that way it's not optional because it's like if you want good food at the end, then you really want to pre treat it. But some foods need certain pre treatments and it's different for each type of food. Just kind of like anything, you know, even if you're freezing food, you're going to run into that what needs a acid bath versus what needs to be blanched. You know, it's all the same sort of a thing. Okay. But the other parts of the skills are, you know, you've got to know how to test that your food is 100% done. And there are some tricks in that, especially when it comes to anything that has seeds in it or that has thick skins. That can be really challenging for people. The other thing is you have to know how to store it properly, otherwise it will ruin. It'll just sit on the shelf and get ruined. Which is, you know, so the opposite of what we're trying to do. I know I can't stand it and I can't stand it when I have to tell people. So, yeah, you really better throw out that food that you work so hard on and spent money on or, you know, grew yourself. That's an awful feeling. But the good news is you can bypass all of that disappointment by just kind of gathering those different skills in those places and then. And then freeze drawing becomes your best friend.
- [20:48]
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- [22:35]
Lisa
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- [23:31]
Lisa
You know for sure? Because what I found is whenever I'd get them out then they would be like really cold if I left it, you know, if I didn't get it out right away or. Yeah, and then sometimes I think like it condensates a little bit. Is that what happens? Or how do you make sure they're completely dry? Like why not just over dry it? What's the disadvantage there too?
- [23:51]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, you can over dry. There actually is no such thing as over freeze drying. So it's not like dehydrating. So like when in doubt, just keep freezing. The downside of doing that is that you're using more electricity. Then you know something can only get 100% dry and then it just is sitting there. Right. It doesn't do anything bad to it at all. So that that's kind of gives you a little insurance policy there that you can just keep going if you're not sure. But there are a few things that happen. One, the sensors in the freeze dryer are not, they're not sensing all of every single tray, right. They're in select spots on different trays and maybe not even every tray depending on the freeze dryer that you. And so your machine is pretty much guessing when your food is done or taking an average of the information that it's gathering for when your food's done. So that can mean that sometimes this, you know, just like in dehydrating, sometimes the stuff in the center tray or the fourth tray down or whatever your particular dehydrator is, isn't as done as all the rest of the trays in there. The other thing that can happen is exactly what you're talking about. Your freeze dryer, if you don't get to it fast enough, will start reducing the temperature in the freeze dryer again on the chances that your food is not actually done. And it wants to keep it in a safe food range so it's not, you know, gathering bacteria so it starts dropping that temperature again. So let's say, you know, it ended in the middle of the night. Obviously you're not going to get to it in the middle of the night because nobody wants yes dried tomatoes that badly to wake up at 2am and so it's just been kind of sitting there in its extra dry mode until you get to it the next morning. And when you get to it, it's back down to 20 degrees, you know, 0 degrees, 50 degree. It can be all over the place on temperature. If you pull that out of the machine right when it's that cold, you instantly get condensation on it which instantly turns into moisture. And that freeze dried food is very, very quickly starting to rehydrate. Anytime even a drop of liquid gets into it, it's rehydrating. So one thing you need to always do is make sure you hit that warm tray button that is on your freeze dryer before you remove the trays. Even before you remove them to test if they are done. You need to push it. Never pull your tray out of the freeze dryer without it being at least room temperature.
- [26:27]
Lisa
Okay, that makes perfect sense now. Yeah, I bet every freeze dried egg in my house is bad right now. Like I didn't even realize it.
- [26:35]
Carolyn Thomas
Well, if, if you're not too humid in your area, you live in a pretty humid area. So if you're humid then yeah, that is going to suck. That condensation is going to be fast and it's going to be a lot. If you live in a really dry area, that may not really be that big of a deal, but it's still best practice. Just hit that warm tray and then pull it out and then work really quickly to go ahead and package each batch of it. So but the way you're going to know when you go to open your packages if it's good or bad, it should still be totally powdery and it should smell fine. If you have those two things, then you're good to go.
- [27:15]
Lisa
Yeah. With eggs you can totally follow the smell. I mean, it's so obvious when you have a bad egg. Now what happens if it's like a little bit bad? I'm just talking from people who might be a little fearful of this. And it smells like almost good. Like what can happen to you there?
- [27:31]
Carolyn Thomas
Well, yeah. And we all know like, even with, you know, fermented food, when you're first getting started, what smells bad versus what smells different than you're used to. Right. And there is, especially with something like freeze dried eggs, there isn't smell that you may not be used to because you've got powdered eggs sitting completely closed in a jar. So that first whiff that hits you is like, whoa, that's strong. Yeah.
- [27:55]
Lisa
Potent egg.
- [27:56]
Carolyn Thomas
Potent egg. What you're really looking for is that your food is completely powdery to the touch.
- [28:02]
Lisa
Okay.
- [28:03]
Carolyn Thomas
It should not be gummy, it should not be sticky. It shouldn't be anything besides completely powdery. So you should be able to pick up a finger full and kind of crumble it. And it should still totally powder in your fingers. If it does that, then it does not have enough moisture in it to be a problem. So then it's completely safe and good to go.
- [28:23]
Lisa
Okay. Yeah. And then you mentioned packaging. I know it's different with most things or maybe it's mostly just the same. What are your recommendations for packaging? Different things?
- [28:34]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah. So I like to break packaging into three different ways of doing it. For freeze dried food, one, you have your ultra long term kind of your prepper storage. Your. You want to put those eggs up for 20 years in case the apocalypse happens. Right. You know, it's like I'm going to be eating eggs no matter what happens. That's, that's. I reserve that for lattes in my house and freeze drying lattes because that's how I feel like if the world goes up in flames, I want to make sure I have a latte to comfort myself. Wait, what do you do? How did you do we freeze dried. I'm curious.
- [29:08]
Lisa
Sorry. We'll come back to this.
- [29:11]
Carolyn Thomas
We freeze dried lattes. You just make your espresso. Pull your espresso. You can do this with coffee, you can do it with tea, you can do it with whatever, but you just make your latte essentially. Except that you don't have to steam your milk because you don't actually need it hot. And you pour it on your trays and you freeze dry it. And when Josh travels, he travels with little individual packets of lattes from home because we're kind of partial to our own cow's milk.
- [29:39]
Lisa
Yes. Home is where the good coffee is. I saw that, like, on a sign somewhere and I'm like, yes, it is. That's right.
- [29:45]
Carolyn Thomas
That's a good sign. I like that one. So, yeah, we. We do that with all sorts of stuff. So. But if you want to drink your latte during the apocalypse, then you need to put that in long term storage. And that's going to mean a mylar bag with an oxygen absorber. Okay. So completely blocking light in that Mylar bag.
- [30:06]
Lisa
Okay.
- [30:07]
Carolyn Thomas
That is really, you know, for most of us who are, like, trying to preserve our garden produce, that's usually outside of our range of normal. Unless you're going backpacking or camping and you want something, or traveling, you want something disposable. That'd be the other time that I would use a Mylar bag, but what I find is that when I have food in a Mylar bag, I don't use it because I can't see it.
- [30:35]
Lisa
Yes, I feel the same way.
- [30:37]
Carolyn Thomas
I also can't organize it on my shelf. Like anybody try to organize Mylar bag bags on anything and it's a pain. You pretty much have to throw them into a bin.
- [30:45]
Lisa
Yeah. Yes, you have to throw them in a bin.
- [30:48]
Carolyn Thomas
So. So for medium term shortage, which is pretty much like, hey, I'm gardening and I want to make sure I have enough to get through until my next good garden year on this particular item. So, you know, it's really going to be about a year to about three, maybe even five years. I love it. Because we all know fruit especially has good years and bad years. So it's like you can put up enough in the good years to get you through the not great years to get around to the good years again, and it'll last really well. And to do that kind of medium term storage, I go with mason jars with an oxygen absorber in them and then vacuum sealed down. And that, that is so practical because you can See into them, they fit on your shelf. You probably already have mason jars laying around. If you're like us, like I, I should have like bought stock. Many involved because I still buy them out, you know, or Azure Jar Canning company or something. But, but yeah, that, that's that way to go. The, the other way that you can package food is if you know you're going to eat it really quickly as in like within a couple of weeks. So I save this for my snacking foods which I don't know about your house but if I lay out freeze dried food like fruit, it is gone in probably 30 minutes in my house. So I, this is a little bit of a moot point in my household. But for most places, especially if you have adults and you, you can control your snacking a little bit, your food can stay pretty good for about two weeks if you keep the hydration, you know, the humidity levels low. And so for that we go with something that's like, like a jar, like an old phyto jar that can be opened and closed and has the seal on it.
- [32:38]
Lisa
Yeah.
- [32:39]
Carolyn Thomas
Or ball now has these lids that have the little rubber gasket on it that you can just put onto your jars. Something like that. And I go with a silica desiccant package in that, not an oxygen absorber.
- [32:51]
Lisa
Okay.
- [32:51]
Carolyn Thomas
And that will keep something dry enough that it really stays pretty good quality for at least two weeks depending on the humidity and how often you get into it. So those are the different ways of packaging. And what I really found is when I first started doing the freeze dried eggs, I was not putting an oxygen absorber in and I was not vacuum sealing my jars. So I was just kind of.
- [33:14]
Lisa
Yeah, I didn't realize how important the vacuum sealing was on the jars.
- [33:16]
Carolyn Thomas
It really is. Especially if you're in a high humidity area. You really, really do need to do that. So. And it's easy to do, you know. Now there's so many options for little handheld vacuum sealers for jars. You don't have to get some fancy vacuum sealer and even you can even put them back into your freeze dryer and vacuum seal in your freeze dryer. Use your vacuum pump and your freeze dryer to vacuum seal. And I can do 10 jars at a time in my freeze dryer. So that's kind of handy.
- [33:45]
Lisa
That. Is that all in your book? Because I've never heard of that.
- [33:49]
Carolyn Thomas
That is in the book, yes. I do cover that on like a side note somewhere in the book. It's really easy though. You just Pull your rack out. It has a little disconnect in the back on the wires. Then you have to, like, put a tray in there just because it's a round drum, so just a flat surface to sit your jars on. And then you put your jars in. You put. You put bands on for that, but just not too tight.
- [34:12]
Lisa
Okay.
- [34:13]
Carolyn Thomas
And then you go into your functional setting button, which is the little leaf on a harvest. Right. And using that, you can just flip on the vacuum pump, and you have to lock the drain down, the drain valve down, so that you're not just sucking air right through the whole system. You know, lock that down, and it'll create a vacuum, and you just let it run for about two minutes, and it'll vacuum seal all those jars. So.
- [34:35]
Lisa
Oh, my goodness.
- [34:36]
Carolyn Thomas
That's a great way. If you're doing a bunch of them.
- [34:38]
Lisa
Yeah, that's so easy. And then do you tighten down the bands after that or just.
- [34:42]
Carolyn Thomas
I take them off?
- [34:42]
Lisa
You could remove them. Okay. Yeah, just remove them. Okay.
- [34:45]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah.
- [34:46]
Lisa
Oh, that's that. I don't know why I've never heard this. I just. I guess I just never thought about how important the storage was, because, like you said, we live in a very humid environment, and I'm sure oxygen's sneaking in under the. You know, even though I have the jars that have. You know, I'm not using, like, plastic lids. But even with the gasket, I'm sure plenty of humidity and oxygen still getting in there.
- [35:09]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, it still does. It still works its way in. And then, you know, I think it's where like, there's atmospheric changes or temperature changes that really kind of gives a little gap for some transfer of humidity, and that will just really start to ruin those really quickly. Even if it doesn't get moist enough for you to notice it and to have, like, a safety problem, it starts declining the quality of it really, really quickly.
- [35:39]
Lisa
Okay. Yeah, that's. That's all such good, good things to know, because you have enough failures with something, it makes you, like, I don't really want to try it, but really, it was probably something simple that you just needed to tweak that would make it just as successful as it was a failure before.
- [35:57]
Carolyn Thomas
Right, Exactly. One thing that I've really been loving and getting into lately is as my family, you know, I don't know about you, Lisa. I know you have kids that are kind of comparable age range as my kids. I had this belief, and it is a very mistaken belief, that as the kids got older and could drive that Life would calm down a little bit. And I don't know where I thought that, but it's wrong.
- [36:25]
Lisa
It's just, it's, it's so wrong. And every like older mom tells you that when you have toddlers and you're like, whatever, whatever. And then you're like, oh, yep, 100%. Like that was the easy days. I, I feel that because there's times when like we'll divide and conquer and Luke will have the big kids and I'll have the little kids and I'm like, like, man, like you just, you, you have like your little schedule. You put like life feels very predictable, very controlled, I guess.
- [36:49]
Carolyn Thomas
Yes, yes. Yeah. And then you get multiple driving or now I have adults, children living in the home, like with their first jobs and their first cars and all of that.
- [36:59]
Lisa
And it's not there yet, but everybody's.
- [37:01]
Carolyn Thomas
Going every direction all the time. And so what I've really been experimenting with is single serve, grab and go freeze dried meals. Oh, in like wide. I like the wide mouth pint jars for that because I feel like they're a really solid serving size. But we are filling the shelves with just the meals that the family would love and then portioning them into single servings and then getting them in these jars. Because literally when my daughter runs to the office and she forgot to make her lunch, she can grab one of those and run out and then at the office she can just put hot water, water into it.
- [37:36]
Lisa
Oh, that's such a good lunch.
- [37:38]
Carolyn Thomas
But I mean the lunch is then mom's chicken pot pie.
- [37:41]
Lisa
Yeah. It's your good stuff.
- [37:42]
Carolyn Thomas
Or chicken fajitas or you know, it's, it's not, it's not the junky stuff that you would get. It's not a cup of noodles from.
- [37:51]
Lisa
Yeah. So are you doing like a bulk day where you make like a massive batch of soup and then put it. Are you just kind of like when you have food, you just little leftover maybe pour it in or what's your process for that?
- [38:02]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, we kind of just double up when we have extra ingredients for things and we'll be like, hey, let's just make a second batch of this tonight. And then. You know, one of the great things about freeze drying is you. It's ideal to pre freeze your food in a freezer and so you can stick those trays right into your freezer until you have enough of them to run a whole batch or a whole freeze dryer load. So kind of whenever we have extra, whether it's leftovers or we're able to make a second batch of something. We just start portioning it off onto freeze dryer trays, get it right into the freezer, and then we just run a batch as soon as we have enough trays. And this is really exciting because it's like where I'm most excited, I think is thinking about when mom gets sick. And nobody quite makes mom the chicken noodle soup that she wants that everybody else gets when they're.
- [38:55]
Lisa
Yeah.
- [38:56]
Carolyn Thomas
So I'm like, I want it freeze dried on the shelf. So I have my cans of soup ready to go for when I don't feel well. And it's made with my own really good quality bone broth. You know, our own home raised chickens, like, I know that it's really good quality and really nourishing.
- [39:11]
Lisa
Now something like chicken pot pie. How are you reconstituting that?
- [39:15]
Carolyn Thomas
You know, reconstituting? I think both in dehydrating and freeze drying, it's such a non modern process anymore that I think we get very nervous about it and it feels very unintuitive. But, but what I found with there's all these fancy methods out there for rehydrating things and honestly just pouring some water over it, it works 99% of the time. The rule about it is if it is something that is raw, you use cold water. If it's something that is cooked or has been blanched, you use like hot water or liquid. And you don't have to get stuck with just water. You can rehydrate with all different liquids. I mean, you think about if you freeze dry apple pie filling, which is to die for, by the way, it is so good. But then you rehydrate it with apple cider instead of water.
- [40:11]
Lisa
Oh, double up on that.
- [40:13]
Carolyn Thomas
Or I mean, what if you go with a cinnamon tea and you rehydrate it with a cinnamon tea instead? Like you can play with the flavors a lot. Think about rehydrating your steak bites. You can rehydrate it with wine with bone broth, with, you know, you could come up with all, I mean, a mushroom tea if you wanted to add some more umami flavor to it. Like you could get really creative with it. But in general, I have found that a vast majority of things, you just put a little water on it, wait a few minutes, double check that it's the right consistency that you want, add a little more water if you need it, and then it's fine. So I think it doesn't need to be as Scary of a. And I even do this with lasagna slices that have been freeze dried. And like just add a little water on and it'll rehydrate. Great.
- [41:00]
Lisa
Now what are you storing those in?
- [41:02]
Carolyn Thomas
The lasagna slices?
- [41:04]
Lisa
The lasagna, like you're doing the soups and stuff. That makes sense. In the Mason jar.
- [41:08]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:08]
Lisa
Like the lasagna and the chicken pot pie.
- [41:10]
Carolyn Thomas
Okay. So in general we have to put those. Well, the chicken pot pie, I do like, I do the filling and then I do, I will cook little rounds, like almost little biscuits out of pie dough on the side. And so I will take a jar and I'll fill it with the filling. And then I'll put a little pie dough that's also been freeze dried right on the top.
- [41:31]
Lisa
Oh.
- [41:32]
Carolyn Thomas
And so then what I do to rehydrate is I pop that little pie dough biscuit off, I rehydrate, I put the biscuit back on, and then it steam rehydrates right on the top of the rest of it and it turns out. Oh, perfect.
- [41:43]
Lisa
Well, that's simple.
- [41:44]
Carolyn Thomas
So, yeah, it makes it really easy for something like the lasagna though. So we've been saving those in mylar bags just because of the space issue. But what I just found were little round silicone, like almost like muffin tins. But I think they'll fit perfectly inside the wide mouth pint jars. So we're gonna start freeze drying things in that to make this perfect little round puck that I can put on. So I'm wondering if I could even like make little mini lasagna that will then fit inside the jar. Just like use a little biscuit cutter.
- [42:19]
Lisa
Okay.
- [42:20]
Carolyn Thomas
All the layers just right. That's a little fussy. I don't know if I will ever like make that a regular thing because, like in bulk.
- [42:28]
Lisa
But just to see how it experiment. Like you said, this isn't a well worn path at this point. So so much of this you're just kind of coming up with and seeing what works.
- [42:36]
Carolyn Thomas
Just trying it. Yeah, we did to write the book because the, the second half of the book actually has a, an complete like encyclopedia of different foods that you might harvest from your garden or your farm. Whether we're, you know, talking proteins or milk or, you know, vegetables or fruit. And we tested all the numbers of like exactly what the best way to do everything was exactly how much you have to purchase or start with in order to fill up certain size trays on your freeze dryer. The exact amount of your rehydration ratios of like, you know, if you want to know exactly instead of just eyeballing it, kind of like I said to just do. But if you're a measurement person and you're like, okay, I have a cup of corn. How much liquid do you need to add? We have ratios exactly for that in the book.
- [43:29]
Lisa
I bet that was a process.
- [43:31]
Carolyn Thomas
It was hundreds.
- [43:32]
Lisa
Like, coming up with all this, it.
- [43:34]
Carolyn Thomas
Was a lot of batches. But it's the numbers that I wanted to know and have in my house. Because the other day we ended up having one extra large tray available that didn't have anything on it on an extra large freeze dryer. And we had corn that I knew we were going to have to start processing. So I was like, well, let's just go to the garden and harvest a little corn and fill up one tray. But then, you know, you're instantly doing that math. I know you do this math that it's like, okay, about how much would go and eat each whatever it is, each jar, each tray, each whatever. Okay, about how much is on each ear of corn. So therefore, let's guess about this many ears of corn.
- [44:13]
Lisa
Yeah.
- [44:14]
Carolyn Thomas
And so I was sitting there doing that and I was like, wait, I just got a copy of my book in. So I flipped over to the corn page and right there it said, for an extra large tray, start with 20 ears of corn. And so I literally went to the garden, grabbed 20 ears of corn, we shucked those, and it worked out to be an exact measurement. And I was like, oh, oh, this is. This is why I wrote this book. It's really, for me, honestly, it's like, these are the numbers that I need to know all the time. So. Yeah, yeah, it. I can't even remember where we started.
- [44:47]
Lisa
I don't even think I thought about, like, when I knew you were writing a freeze drawing book. I don't think I thought about what all would go into. Like, I realized now what all I'm doing wrong, how this could all be better. I don't think I realized, like, what went into the skill that went into freeze drying. But I also knew that I haven't made it work that great for my own family. So I think that that's where all the pieces come together. It makes a lot of sense.
- [45:11]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things that, like, you can get away with a little bit, kind of doing it half heartedly, I guess. And that's where I started was just kind of tossing things in, but you're probably not going to have the results that you see in the marketing of the freeze dryer. Right. So it's always going to be a little bit of a disappointment because you're going to be like, I thought it would be better than this. Well, it can be. You just have to actually learn the skill to do it.
- [45:38]
Lisa
Yes, that'll make sense. Okay, one more thing I want to ask you about. Is your freeze dryer set up? Just because I'm really curious. I don't feel like I've ever had my setup as convenient and like set up as I should to make this a regular part of our lives. And I'm just assuming that you probably do.
- [45:54]
Carolyn Thomas
Yes. Although with three machines, you do have to get a little opportunistic about where they all live. Because nobody has a house that was designed with freeze dryers in mind, you know? Yeah. So you do have to kind of figure out where the space is going to work. There is a noise issue. They are a little noisy. They aren't terrible. I wouldn't say they're worse than an average dishwasher. If you have, we have the premium pumps on ours and those are not too loud. If noise is an issue, do not go with an oil less pump. Those are very loud.
- [46:26]
Lisa
Okay, that's good to know.
- [46:28]
Carolyn Thomas
So. But you also want them accessible because you do need to check on them and you need to work with them. And you do want them relatively near a freezer if you're pre freezing food because you don't want to be trying to walk around. They get really cold, those trays, those metal trays. So I find that I have to use oven mitts already. But you know, if you have five trays, six trays, seven trays that can go in your freeze dryer, you don't want to be making that many runs to a freezer that's a long ways away. So you want them kind of close if you can. What you need to know is that freeze dryers are heavy and they vibrate because they're machinery. And so you need them on something heavy duty. You do not want them on a flimsy little cart thing that could collapse. Because that's a big investment. You don't want injuries too. Yeah. So something that's really heavy duty. We ended up with like a commercial kitchen stainless steel rack that has like a butcher top on it.
- [47:28]
Lisa
Okay.
- [47:28]
Carolyn Thomas
And I love that because it has a store, a storage shelf underneath it that's stainless steel. So I can have the freeze dryers on the top of it. They're nice and heavy duty. Underneath that on a rack, I can have the pumps in any equipment that I have. And then below that on the ground, you have your location for your drainage bucket, which is where, like, you know, when your food is freeze drying, it sucks out the moisture. Well, that moisture has to go somewhere, right? So it goes out that drain hose and down. You want it to always be below into. Into a bucket. And it just kind of gravity drains to there. And then you can. And dump that out. And so. So I've loved that setup with those kind of different tiers.
- [48:12]
Lisa
Are you able to have all three of them in the same spot or are they kind of. No, I mean, that. Yeah, that would be a lot. So are they all near your kitchen or do you have some, like, in the basement or the garage?
- [48:21]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, they're all in the basement, but I have a kitchen in the basement. So where I film is in my second kitchen, which is in the basement, because, you know, I. So many props to you because you actually film in your household kitchen. And I'm like, I would cry all the time because so much is happening in there all the time. And there's always somebody working in the kitchen that I just wasn't able to make that work. So this is a kitchen downstairs, and I'm able to have the. The freeze dryers. Right. Two of them right here. Another one's in another room because it's really big. That's the extra large. And, you know, we just didn't have additional space down here.
- [48:59]
Lisa
Yeah, well, that makes sense though. Like, even if you didn't have a kitchen in your basement, but you wanted to do your freeze drying in the basement, if you had some kind of work surface down there, all of your, like, racks that you're going to put everything on when you're storing. I could totally see how even without a kitchen, you could get the whole setup that you need fairly inexpensively. Like, what else would you have to have? You wouldn't necessarily need a sink or. I mean, I guess it'd be nice to be able to like, wash your knives and stuff. Stuff. But you can put it in, like, a whole setup.
- [49:28]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, you just walk those back to your kitchen. Or you do. You know, we do all the work in the main kitchen. Most of the time we just bring the freeze dryer trays down and stick them in the freeze dryer.
- [49:36]
Lisa
Oh, okay.
- [49:37]
Carolyn Thomas
So, yeah, one thing that's really nice to have if you're going to do a lot of it is a packaging setup, like where you have it there are stand free funnels that are, they actually have their own stand with an adjustable height and they're large enough to be able to take your whole tray and dump it in and then it funnels it into mylar bag or a half gallon jar or a quart jar, whatever you want. So having something like that set up with your vacuum sealer and if you're using mylar bags, you need an impulse or heat sealer to seal those bags. You know, that kind of setup is you want near your machine. But aside from that, there's not really a lot of additional equipment that you have to have outside of your regular kitchen stuff that you already have.
- [50:24]
Lisa
I mean if you're going to be growing as much food as you all are, or if you aspire to be self sufficient in some way, having that set up to where it, it's easy. Like there's not a huge rub between like the vet, the garden and then the preservation is even just a little bit of something like in your way, a little bit of inconvenience makes it to where it's, it's just something you don't do. So I think taking those extra steps to really have it set up and ready to go, like even like you said, having that funnel thinking like how can I make this more efficient Would be really important.
- [50:59]
Carolyn Thomas
Yes, yeah, yeah, definitely. And especially if you're using your freeze dryer like constantly the this season of the year, you know, I know a lot of us are like that. The, the canners are kind of running constantly, the dehydrators are running constantly. You get to the place where your freeze dryers are just running constantly and so you're swapping in and out batches. So every step you can make to make it more efficient is time that you've saved in the long run and it adds up pretty quickly.
- [51:24]
Lisa
Yeah, yeah. All right, well tell us where we can find your book because it launches or it's. Is it out now or just pre order now?
- [51:32]
Carolyn Thomas
It just. The day that we're filming this, it came out yesterday, it launched.
- [51:38]
Lisa
Okay. So yeah, it's way out by time this comes out. So get your hands on this book. Where do you recommend getting it?
- [51:44]
Carolyn Thomas
You can get it from homesteadliving.com and go over there. I'm sure Lisa, you can put some links in for them. You can also grab it on Amazon or you know, it should start appearing in all sorts of different places wherever you buy your books. And if you have a bookseller that you love that isn't carrying it, please request it and ask them to look it up and start selling it. But it is out and it is available and if you freeze dry or if you're dreaming about freeze drying, it is definitely the book you're going to want to get on your shelf just for your everyday reference and for learning all the steps that you need to know.
- [52:23]
Lisa
I mean I'm fully sold. I need this book here in our house for sure. Awesome Carolyn, thank you so much. And we, we're just so glad you're back on. I know I'm going to be on yours talking about Sourdough so make sure to check out the pantry. Chat over on Homesteading family as well. Great podcast over there. Again thanks so much Carolyn.
- [52:44]
Carolyn Thomas
Yeah, thank you Lisa. It's great hanging out with you.
- [52:47]
Lisa
Right as always. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next episode of the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast.