Getting the family to eat leftovers is like pulling teeth around here. My wife will eat leftovers once at most. My in-laws almost never. My youngest child and my mother, maybe occasionally. Me? I’d eat leftovers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if I have to. But at some point, even I get tired of eating them. So, I’ve sworn to freeze-dry our leftovers if it gets to the point where I might toss them out, and that’s why I tried to freeze dry (technically) four different foods:
Although it might be difficult to tell, I have some shredded chicken on the left, Spanish rice to the right of that, a different type of shredded chicken, and then an actual meal called Marry Me chicken, which includes spinach and sun dried tomatoes. Yes, we eat a lot of chicken around here at times.
Aside from wanting to make use of my rather expensive freeze dryer as I am feeling a bit of buyers remorse because I really thought I’d have used it more by now, I was curious how the unit would deal with multiple different foods at one time. Granted, I have tried this in the past, such as with the tilapia and vegetables I put in during the same batch, but I figure it never hurts to try more foods and see what happens.
Anyway, the freeze dryer needed about twenty hours until it decided it was done. For the most part, I agreed; however, I wasn’t entirely convinced that the Marry Me Chicken dish was fully dried out because one or two pieces of the chicken didn’t quite flake like I’d expected, so I put it back in for three more hours, though mostly because I’m paranoid.
During that time, my wife came home from work and completely distracted me while I was trying to package up the other food, which is why I don’t have good “after the fact” photos to show today. Sorry. Blame her!
I did remember to take a photo of the Marry Me Chicken while still on the tray:
The Marry Me chicken actually looks pretty good, considering that it has sun dried tomatoes and spinach in it. For what it’s worth, I always keep some of the food I freeze-dry out for later taste testing. As such, this is the best photo I’ve got after everything was freeze-dried:
There’s a little bit of shredded Caesar chicken at the top left, quite a bit of the Marry Me chicken at the top right, a decent amount of Spanish rice at the bottom left (which all seemed to clump together), and a good portion of shredded taco chicken at the bottom right.
Here’s what I got packaged:
I ended up with 8.5 ounces of shredded taco chicken (in two separate bags), 6.3 ounces of shredded Caesar chicken, 5.3 ounces of Spanish rice, and 11.0 ounces of the Marry Me chicken. That’s enough for maybe two solid meals for the entire family. At approximately 23 hours total runtime, it cost roughly $3.15 in electricity (assumes the summer electricity rate, which is slightly higher than our current winter rate, but I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to do that math.)
I should point out that each Mylar bag and oxygen absorber I use costs about $1, so there’s an added five dollars just to package it all up.
Last, I was curious what freeze-dried chicken was going for online, and the cheapest I could find was a #10 can by Mountain House for $55. That can holds 1.1 pounds of diced chicken (or 17 ounces). Seeing how I put up nearly 15 ounces of shredded chicken alone in this batch, I’m feeling even better about my freeze-dryer than when I started this blog post. 🙂
So, what’s the verdict?
I’d say that the freeze-dryer did a good job handling three different types of foods at once, though it was really the large chunks of chicken in the Marry Me chicken dish that had me most concerned it wasn’t going to work out right. Thus far, I’m pleasantly surprised at how well the Harvest Right freeze dryer is doing with whatever I’ve thrown at it.
How did it all taste?
That’s an area I’m struggling with, at least with regards to meals. I clearly need to do some research on how to properly rehydrate meals without losing the seasoning because that’s my biggest complaint: having to submerge all of the food well enough so that it can properly rehydrate yet not so much that the seasoning gets lost when I inevitably pour out excess water.
Overall, I’d say the shredded chicken tasted good once I got the excess water out, though I would probably have wanted to add just a bit of additional seasoning. The Marry Me chicken dish was hit or miss because a few pieces of the chicken didn’t fully rehydrate; additionally, the sun dried tomato didn’t seem to rehydrate well whatsoever, which I thought was strange. The Spanish rice was too watery for my preference, but I didn’t drain any of the water out before trying it, so that was likely the problem.
In any case, if I were down to eating these foods as meals, I’d say that nobody in my family would complain.
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