It’s no secret that on this channel we believe that freeze-dried food is the ultimate currency of the apocalypse. Some people even say we talk about it too much. But the reason why we do is because it’s the single most important preparedness item that you can store. If you don’t know what freeze-drying is and why it’s the most overlooked invention of the 20th century, you can watch our videos about it here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Here’s a word of caution. There’s a right way and a wrong way to rehydrate your food.

It’s not like in the movie Back to the Future 2 where they put the mini pizza in the rehydration machine and it comes out perfect. Today we’re going to share with you some secret tips on how you can properly rehydrate your food, so that you don’t end up with something that’s a dilapidated, soggy mess and is just the perfect texture. Hi folks, Canadian Prepper. Today we are back with Steve Syros, owner of FreezeDry Wholesale, the guy who’s filling up the government bunkers and all the elites and even your pantries with this freeze-dry goodness.

Today we’re going to talk about the science and the chemistry of freeze-drying. Now this video is perhaps going to be a little bit more advanced. We do some introductory videos where we talk about what freeze-drying is. But this video we’re going to talk a bit more in detail about how exactly it works and more importantly how you can rehydrate the stuff that you get. Because there’s almost a science in an art form to that in itself, right? I’d call it an art form. I mean it’s pretty hard to mess it up, but there’s ways to do it right and ways to do it wrong.

There’s things that are easy to rehydrate, like chicken, just pour hot water on it, or any water. And then there’s things that are a bit more challenging. Different textures. The coating on a chicken nugget is an example. Easy to rehydrate, tough to get that crunch with out getting too soggy. So for that we’re going to be experimenting with rehydration, then we’re going to toast it afterwards. It’s an intimidating process and even us talking about it is probably scaring a lot of people. You don’t need to really overthink it. Basically freeze-drying is the process of removing the moisture from the product.

All you’re doing is adding the moisture back in. There’s no wrong way, but there are some ways you can enhance it greatly if that makes sense. But there are foods that if you don’t do it right, like I did a Belgian waffle that was 20 years old, and it just got soggy because I didn’t do it properly. So there are five general ways that you can rehydrate your food. You can steam it, you can use cold water, you can use hot water, you can use the napkin method, you can use the plastic bag method, or you can just eat it dry, but make sure you have a large cup of water handy.

You want to consider the fat content, which will help you decide which method you use because those fat molecules can inhibit the water uptake. Chicken breast is relatively low in fat, but those cell walls will close, especially if we’re talking 20 years from now, that food’s been in a freeze-dried state for a couple of decades. It might take a little bit longer, not necessarily because of the fat, so a cold water bath will work well. You might want to give it two hours 20 years from now. The food will determine the method.

Anything that’s breaded, pancakes, waffles, anything that can get soggy will probably get soggy if you liquefy it. Yep. For something like freeze-dried slice of pizza, if you want to approximate that texture, you’re pretty much going to have to steam it. If you soak it in water, it might get soggy bread. Something like this, like a classic pound cake, you probably want to steam that as well. You would. That’s a thick, you know, it’s an inch thick slice, so it’ll take some time to penetrate. I’m going to put this in the steamer and we’re going to see what happens.

What we have here is we have some paper towel or you can use a cloth or an old dirty t-shirt if you want that deep southern flavoring. You can use a Ziploc bag, but you don’t have to, but this might speed up the process, keep the moisture in, or you can use saran wrap. Tin foil or a piece of Tupperware or something, just to trap that moisture. All you’re really doing is you’re taking a, you know, you can see how hard that is. Do you wet the napkin first? I usually just run it.

All you want to do is run it under the sink, get rid of any excess, shake it out, and what you’re left with is just basically a dry piece of food and a wet paper towel, and then this will literally, in a matter of a couple hours, reabsorb slowly that moisture and it’ll go back to that normal texture. So that napkin has a way of controlling how much liquid is going into it. Yep, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t do that with chicken breast. It’s just a slower, gentler method. You could do that with a piece of steak or roast beef as well.

Or I have to let it slowly kind of get… It’ll make a big difference, yeah. Again, there’s no right way, there’s no wrong way, but this definitely will have a better end result for you. So yesterday we put a bunch of stuff in Ziploc bags. I did a couple of the uncooked meats and a couple of the cooked meats. I did pork chops. You typically won’t want to use a boiling water on an uncooked pork chop because it’ll just, it’ll poach it. It’ll cook it very quickly. You can do that on the fly, but the right way to do that would be a little bit of cold water in a sealed Ziploc bag, and you have access to refrigeration, let it sit for a while.

If you really want to get creative, you get your Ziploc bag, you put some marinade in there, you put your freeze dried piece of meat, you let that sit in there overnight, and it’s going to be able to achieve a level of infusion of the flavor that you’re never going to be able to achieve with just piece of meat that’s not freeze dried. The flavor will blow you away. Yeah, and I can tell you that there is a noticeable difference. So I’m just going to pull one of these out, and we can see the texture difference.

That was an uncooked pork chop that was a piece of styrofoam texture wise, but now it’s basically a fresh pork chop that you bought at your butcher shop. Toss it on the grill, throw it on a sear pan, and go to town. Okay, so I’m trying to pull this apart, right? And you can’t pull it, but let’s compare that to styrofoam. So that’s before, and this is after, right? So it’s incredible the difference just that water makes. So let’s check out the, this is the roast beef. This is roast beef fully cooked.

So this one is fully cooked, and you can see that beautiful texture. So here we got some meatballs. That’s a fully cooked Italian style meatball. Then we did those. So we just, you just put water in the bag. That was just very simple, toss six of them in a bag, a squirt of water from the sink, and threw them in the fridge. So you don’t really need napkins from most of this stuff? No. If you noticed when you were wringing that pork chop out, it was shedding water, it was dripping. It will only absorb back the amount of water that we took out.

You can’t over-rehydrate it. In between the cells, you can actually have more water. So you want to, you would want to ideally let that sit before you tossed it on a grill. And last but not least, we have some freeze-dried cod loins. Cod loins, yeah. Don’t know if I want to open this because we’re in the office, and that would be, that’s a sin I hear. Fish rehydrates really well I find because- That probably was maybe 60 seconds it took. Yeah, really nice texture there on the cod. Freeze-dried roast beef. You can do the napkin method for this as well.

You can also immerse that in cold water. Now it’s fully cooked, so you could actually use boiling water and probably eat that in three or four minutes. But cold water in the fridge for a couple hours and it’s going to be perfect, just like it was before we freeze-dried it. And then anything like this that’s granular, that has limited surface here, I should say, really easy to rehydrate. All right, so here we have some freeze-dried Canadian bacon. What is Canadian bacon? Is it bacon or is it ham? Yeah, that’s the age-old question.

I mean, I think it’s ham with a fancy name, but they should absorb pretty quick, especially boiling water like this. Hear it? Hear it? Yeah, bubbling. See the bubbles? Yeah, see that’s going very quick. Get a smart mic on there. It is actually sizzling. Already rehydrated. Look at that. Oh, it’s done. There you go. Just like that. Cheers. Cheers. Host of uplifted bacon. Canadian bacon. Good? Yeah, I’m good, yeah. Good flavor. That literally no camera work was 45 seconds? Pretty darn quick. So let’s go back to our, we got our pound cake. Wow. That actually looks pretty good.

I can smell it too. It smells great. Came right back to the original. It really smells great. That’s amazing. What was that? Seven, maybe eight minutes in there? You should try that one. What do you say? Pretty good, hey? No, that’s really good, man. Yeah, so it’s not complicated. People tend to overthink it. I’m actually shocked by how good that was. How fast and how quick it comes back. Yeah, that’s incredible. Now you see why we do six different pound cakes. Yeah, no idea. Banana, marble, double chocolate. I would suggest. Can’t get enough. Throw some pound cake into your.

And if you immersed it in water because you didn’t have access to a steamer, let’s stand for half a day. Wrap it in a dry paper towel, maybe. And it’ll shed that water and it’ll go back to pretty close to that texture. You’re not limited to just a steamer. You have hundreds of different varieties of this stuff. We’ve just barely scratched the surface. We just wanted to give people a breakdown of how to rehydrate different things because it can be challenging. I know it’s an industry secret how you do a lot of your stuff, but can you maybe just tell people how is it that there’s no oxygen in here? That food, when it comes out of the freeze dryer, is in sort of a state of suspended animation.

And over time, especially if there’s humidity in the air left out to stand, we’ll start to reabsorb that water in the form of humidity. People use oxygen absorbers, desiccants. Those will absorb excess oxygen in the bag and excess moisture. There’s other ways that are a little bit more advanced, like nitrogen flushing. Nitrogen is heavier than oxygen, air. And the way you get sort of a vacuum on that, there’s 21% oxygen in our atmosphere. If you remove the oxygen over time, you’ll get that sort of vacuum appearance. So there’s several ways to do it, but the end result is you want zero oxygen and zero moisture.

And then that will last indefinitely. This is sort of going above and beyond. Yeah, you don’t really have to worry about rotating food with this kind of a shelf life, but not first in, first out. Throw it in something to protect it from white heat and it’ll be there if you need it. It keeps all those nutrients. It does. Calories, nutrients, no loss whatsoever. There’s a lot of things you can do when you’re getting a food in its dry form. Like just even thinking about this pizza, like you might be able to grind that up, make some kind of paste and then toast it.

Or like you might, you know, there’s just different things. Pizza paste. I try it. You’re just being nice. Kind of. I’m all alone here, folks. Anyways, man, thanks for coming out. I appreciate it. Appreciate to have you here as always. Look forward to doing it again. Guys, if you want to get 15% off wholesale freeze dry, go check out the link in the description below and build up your post-collapse pantry. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. Canadian Prepero. [tr:trw].

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