An Update on Our Egg Preservation Experiment

Back on July 5th of last year I believe we posted about trying a new way to preserve eggs.  Before the mink killed the majority of our flock, we had a plethora of eggs.  We used a dehydrator to dehydrate a bunch of them.  You can read about that process by clicking this link right here:  Dehydrated Eggs

At the end of that post in which we showed the process of dehydrating them, we mentioned at the end that we would keep you updated when we ate them to give a review.  Eight and a half months later and here we are.  Tricia pulled a half pint jar of dehydrated eggs out of the pantry and ran it through the food processor to turn it to a fine powder.

Here is what the dehydrated egg powder looks like.  It smells like... well, eggs.

So now the time comes to scramble up some eggs.  So how do you convert this powder back into eggs?  Well, the ratio is 2 Tablespoons egg powder + 2 Tablespoons water = 1 egg  (We played around with the amount of water until we got the consistency we wanted.)

So we followed the recipe and rehydrated our egg powder into an egg:

Okay, I'm going to be honest.  It just looks gross.  I guess I'm an egg purist.  I like gathering fresh eggs, cracking them and frying them in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet.  This process seems weird, but we're looking at different ways to preserve eggs.  Each method has its benefits, to be sure.

We put the reconstituted egg in the skillet and scrambled it.  It cooked like an egg. It looked like an egg.  It smelled like an egg.

There was one important think left to do.  Taste it.  This egg has been sitting in a jar in the form of a powder for 8 1/2 months.  How would it taste?  Here are the reviews:  

Kyle:    It tasted like a scrambled egg.  The texture was slightly different than a fresh egg, but I would have thought that this was a fresh scrambled egg had no one told me about it.

Tricia:    It had a slight "metallic" taste, but it was definitely edible.

We've eaten it several times since this post.  It's always fun to learn to do new things.  I like my eggs fresh, but if we had an abundance of eggs and wanted to make some 'shelf stable,' this is definitely an option.

Tomato Powder

Tomato Powder?  That sounds strange.  Never heard of it.  We'll talk a little about it tonight.  The tomato harvest was so plentiful this season, we ran out of jars!  They are still coming in and we are making and eating pico de gallo and many other tomato dishes as fast as we can, but they are still piling up.

Tricia is making a lot of dehydrated tomatoes with sea salt and rosemary and that gave her an idea.  She decided that we would dehydrate tomatoes and then blend into a powder and can it up.  First we had to purchase some additional trays for the dehydrator.  The silicone liners came in and Tricia made up a big batch of tomato sauce on the stove top.

This time instead of water bath canning the tomato sauce in jars, she poured into the new trays on the dehydrator and turned it on.  After a while, the tomato sauce looked like this:

I'm picking it up and it is dry.  The consistency is like that of Fruit Roll ups or fruit "leather."

The tomato "leather" was broken up and put in a blender where it turned into a rich, aromatic powder!

Here is a closer look at it:

What shall we do with tomato powder?  Well this table tells us:

If you mix equal parts powder and water, you get tomato paste.  1 part powder to 3 parts water, and you get tomato sauce.  You can also make soup and juice.  We are canning tomato powder up as well.  

Three Mile Island Pepper

Last week we showed you how we dehydrated jalapeno peppers and then ground it into pepper that we use to flavor dishes.  I used a lot of it today on top of some purple hull peas & sausage over white rice.  It added some flavor depth - hot, but not swell up your tongue and watery-eyes hot.

Our son, Russ, saw what we had done and wanted us to try to dehydrate and grind into ground pepper some of his peppers.  He had a very productive habanero pepper plant or two this year.  He put up four gallon-sized zip loc bags of habaneros in his freezer.  This week he brought over two of the four bags for us to process.  He had already cut them into rings so they'd fit better in the freezer.

We poured them onto the trays of the dehydrator while they were frozen and then used a fork to spread them out evenly so they would dry in a uniform fashion.

Pretty soon we had every rack filled.  We would have to do this in two separate batches.  I was a little concerned about them being frozen, buy they dried just the same.

The habaneros shrunk up to half its size in no time as all the water was removed in the drying process, leaving just the heat.

While hot and dry, Tricia put them into the food processer and gave it a whirl or two.  Here's the part where we wanted to be really careful.  That red dust in the air would be really painful to get in your eyes.  It also would not be pleasant to breathe it in.

Here's what a habanero looks like whole.  It's candy-apple red and has a pointed tail.

Two gallon-sized ziploc bags of peppers yielded this much ground habanero pepper.  We have two more to process and then we'll be done.

I haven't worked up the boldness to try this yet.  I can handle jalapenos.  I just don't think I could do habaneros.  These things are just really hot.  Radioactive hot.  I think we'll label this container, "Three Mile Island Pepper."  It'll put hair on your chest, for sure.

Some Like It Hot

Peppers are a staple in our garden year by year.  We grow sweet peppers like Emerald Bell, Lilac Bell, Horizon Bell, Chocolate Bell, and Banana peppers.  We also have some mild peppers like Anaheim peppers and criolla sellas and then some hot peppers like jalapenos.  We cook with them, make pepper jelly and eat them raw.  We make a lot of Jalapeno Poppers.

The peppers grow and produce throughout the year, but they really produce in abundance during the fall.  Last year we cut a bunch of them up and put them in the dehydrator.  We have a full one gallon ziploc bag of dehydrated jalapeno peppers.  Whenever we cook, Tricia will grab a tablespoon full and put in the pot.

In anticipation of another bumper crop about to come in, we decided to do something with the dehydrated peppers from last year.  We got them out and poured them into the food processor.

After processing for a while, what's left is ground jalapeno pepper.  As soon as we took the cover off of the processer, we both began to sneeze.  The hot pepper was in the air!  Even though we couldn't see it, our sneezes evidenced that fact.

We poured the ground jalapeno pepper into a spice container.

Just yesterday, we had Chicken Fricassee for lunch.  Ground jalapeno pepper was sprinkled on top and it added a whole additional layer of flavor.  Delicious!

Trying a New Thing with Okra

Our three rows of okra has really produced this year.  We've given a lot away.  We've eaten a lot - mostly oven fried okra, stewed okra with tomatoes and onions, okra with ground meat over rice, and pickled okra.  We began putting bags of cooked okra up in the freezer for "gumbo season."  We even eat some of it raw.

We never tried dehydrating it and thought we would try that out.  Here is a day's picking of the three varieties we grow: Clemson spineless, burgundy, and Beck's Big okra.

Prior to dehydrating, Tricia blanched the okra.  Notice how the burgundy okra loses its color:

She cut the okra in half and laid out on the trays of the dehydrator.  She dehydrated them on the vegetable setting for 12 hours.

And then they were dehydrated.  We ate a bunch of them.  Crunchy.  Tasty.

They are probably 1/3 or 1/4 the size of what they were when we put them in the dehydrator.

The remaining ones that we didn't eat were stored in a quart-sized mason jar.

We'll snack on them.  I like them.  I'll experiment and shake some salt and other seasonings in the jar to add a little "pop."

Making Tomato Candy

The tomato crop is about done for the summer.  The heat and the stinkbugs have the tomato plants throwing in the towel.  We had been picking them green, bringing them inside, and putting them in a brown paper bag for ripening.  You can't really vine ripen tomatoes around here once it warms up and the bug pressure gets bad.  Oh, we could solve the problem, I think, if we spray pesticides on the tomatoes, but I don't want to eat pesticides.  Next year, I will do my homework and see if there are any natural products (Neem Oil?) that work on stink bugs.

We still made a nice tomato crop this year and eat them most every day.  Today, we'll show you how we make a great tasting snack that we call "Tomato Candy."  It's very easy and very tasty.  We cut up the homegrown tomatoes into wedges and put them on the trays of the food dehydrator.

We sprinkle them with kosher salt and cracked black pepper.  Then we go to the herb patch and get some fresh rosemary and put the rosemary on top of the tomatoes.

After a few hours, the tomato candy is done.  You can tell that the tomatoes have been dehydrated.  All the water has been removed, leaving the tomatoes concentrated with flavor!

While they're not exactly sun-dried tomatoes, its the same concept.

We store the tomato candy in mason jars and snack on them until they're gone - which doesn't take long!

More Things To Do With a Bumper Crop of Tomatoes

The 2018 crop of heirloom tomatoes are still coming in.  Numerous varieties.  Some big and fat.  Some little. Some deep, blood-red, some yellow, some orange and some almost black.  I have fun growing them.  Lately, however, when I bring yet another bucket full into the house, Tricia almost groans.

We've canned forty-something pints of diced tomatoes and about the same amount of tomato sauce. 

Tricia makes an Italian tomato salad that she likes and we've made numerous batches of pico de gallo.

Today we'll be drying some tomatoes in the food dehydrator.  It is a simple thing to do.  You simply core out the tomatoes and cut them into quarters and align them on the dehydrator trays.  I pack them in pretty tight.  They will shrink up.

You want to get them close together to make the most of the space that you have.

I'll liberally shake kosher salt over the tomatoes and then I went outside and picked a whole bunch of rosemary.  I skinned the needles off of the rosemary and sprinkled lots of it on top of the cut up tomatoes.

Once I have all the trays prepared and ready, it is time to get them dehydrating.

It takes only about a day for the tomatoes to be dried.  All of the water has been removed and it leaves behind a concentrated flavor of tomatoes, salt and rosemary that is like candy to eat!

We've made several batches.  Once totally dried, we store in mason jars and zip loc bags and snack on them.  I'm not a big fan of raw tomatoes, but dried tomatoes are quite good.

We have a few jars of dried seasoned, herbed tomatoes put aside and many more on the way!

The smaller tomatoes actually make the best dried tomatoes. 

Drying Peppers (and a review of our new vacuum sealer)

Yesterday we picked a peck of frost-wrecked peppers.  What to do with them all? We cooked some of them.  We chopped and froze some more and today we'll dehydrate some peppers.  I like to diversify our storage methods to offer some 'insurance' in the event we lose power and as a result, lose everything in our freezer. That would not be good.

Dehydrating offers another method of preserving the harvest and a way to hold the fruits of your labor in a shelf-stable way.  Drying peppers is easy.  I guess the most time consuming part of the task is slicing the peppers to a 1/4 inch thickness.  I washed up the peppers, got out a knife and the cutting board and got busy.

Slicing Peppers

Once sliced to the appropriate thickness of 1/4 inch, we arranged them on the drying racks in the food dehydrator.  You can see the green color of the peppers as well as the red color and the deep brown color of the chocolate peppers.

Arranged on the drying racks and ready to dry

We set the dehydrator on the Vegetable Setting which blows air at a temperature of about 135 degrees Fahrenheit and turned it on.  According to the directions, you let it blow for anywhere between 4 and 12 hours or until the peppers feel "leathery." Here is a tray of leathery peppers all dried after staying in the dehydrator overnight. These dried peppers can be added to soups, gravies, or any other dish. They are packed with flavor and once re-hydrated and cooked, make a great addition to your meal.

Dehydrated Peppers

And that's all there is to it.  Except for, of course, storage.  You just have to make sure that the peppers are kept airtight and you can store them on a shelf in your pantry for whenever you are ready to cook with them.

This is a perfect opportunity to showcase our new vacuum-sealer.  This unit was relatively inexpensive and was easily to assemble.  It is an energy star appliance that actually uses no electric or hydrocarbon-based energy to operate.  Let's take a look at the vacuum sealer.  All you do is put the dehydrated peppers in a Ziploc bag and seal it tight except for one side on the end.  Insert a drinking straw and seal the ziploc seal tightly around the straw.

The Vacuum Pro Sealer XL

To operate the sealer one must put the straw into your mouth and inhale.  Hold the ziploc bag tightly around the straw and suck deeply.  This action turns the sealer on and you can observe the air being evacuated from the ziploc bag.  Once there is no more air to suck out of the bag, while you are still sucking on the straw, quickly pull the straw out of the bag and simultaneously seal the ziploc bag completely, preserving the vacuum.

Powering up the Seal-A-Meal

And there you have it, folks.  One tightly sealed bag of dehydrated peppers.  The bag is labeled and dated and will be stored in our pantry until ready for use in Tricia's kitchen.

The Finished Product

Our vacuum sealer is useful and comes recommended highly.  A few users of this product have complained about the lack of the bag to hold a vacuum, but that is more a function of a poor airlock on the bag and not a poor reflection on the operator of the sealer, also known as the sucker.  Ha Ha.