The AMAZING freeze dried pizza challenge!!! preppers... survival... science...

lecale wrote: ↑ Naw, water is the most important nutrient to me, so I am always trying to eat moister foods like vegetables, fruit, etc.

Though...I think the cheese might end up like this stuff v and yeah I would eat that.



So yes/no. Depends on if the food has a lot of fat in it I guess (e.g., potato chips have no moisture so they are freeze-dried-like)

lecale wrote: ↑ So these people are...outdoorspeople? Preppers? Really twisted foodies?

I think you could probably overbake a Ristorante and get a similar cracker result (lol my roommate is awesome at it) so yeah, honestly, I would and have eaten that.

Babybel isn't real cheese (process) so I don't think they were using the right kind of cheese for this experiment. If you cook pasta and dehydrate I suppose it is like the pasta version of Minute Rice. I can see that working well.

lecale wrote: ↑
Yeah, you should see the pizza when buddy's done with it. A little bit caramelized. I think the Ristorante worked out so well for Prepper Guy because it is a cracker-type crust to begin with.

I didn't realize you could do this with spaghetti but I guess ramen noodles are dehydrated by frying...so the dehydrated spaghetti is just like ramen without all the grease.

(Last night I had to make spaghetti for the neighbour because his wife was out and he put a pack in cold water and then brought it to the boil and was confused that he created a large bonded rectangle of noodles...anyway it was 30 minutes to boil enough water and cook the stuff and get him out the door, so dehydrated spaghetti is topically interesting. He could have been gone in 3 minutes.)

Does this prepper guy have an all-meat video? Sort of intrigued at the palatable rehydrated chicken and the success with ground beef you mentioned.

EDIT: my relatives in alberta do a ground beef jerky like this one (oven dehydration) http://allrecipes.com/recipe/234518/ground-beef-jerky/ You need to start with tube beef because it is a really fine grind, or process it finer yourself.

Feneant wrote: ↑ Well, there's not much new about this, you can buy more and more freeze dried foods, even Costco has a large section on their website. Check out Thrive , they have fruits, veggies, meats, grains, dairy, bakery, etc... a few years ago they only had fruit and veggies.

Hard to know how they taste, a lot of reviews say they are great and taste just like fresh but I suspect they are given free products to review positively- but then again, when your freeze dried strawberries are the last you'll ever eat, maybe that makes them taste better,

lecale wrote: ↑ Hmm I would do the steak by marinading it first, then dehydrating it. To season I would baste the steak with base https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/better-tha ... 0188766890 instead of salt and then add dry spice. I think the base would help recover some of the beef flavour, and it would fix the not enough salt issue too.

The meat should be about 3/4 water so that 12 oz steak would go down to 3 oz. To rehydrate, instead of dunking it in an unmeasured quantity of water, I would precisely marinade the steak in a ziplock with the missing 9 oz (~255 ml, or 1 cup + 1 tbsp) water. If the steak is able to fully rehydrate it would suck up all the water and spice AND you don't have to lug a bottle of A1 into the woods. I would like to see THAT as an experiment - how much water can the meat recover to begin with? They also had a grey colour on their grilled steaks because of steam because they were too wet still.

When you fully cook pretty much any kind of meat your weight goes 1/6, so if the meat doesn't recover all of its water it's sort of cooked to begin with. Plus, those steaks were fast-fry thin. I think you just want a minute a side to heat and eat. I wouldn't actually give them any serious grill time.

I wonder what they would be like if you grilled them rare and then dehydrated them? A judicious amount of boiling water in a ziploc might make them ready-to-eat. Plus, you'd have enough grill time to actually get some smoke into them.

Have you tried any of these experiments at home yet?