Pete, I enjoy lentils more than my family. I usually cook too much and have to freeze. I was wondering how many pounds of lentils did you use for this recipe? Do you also can the soup? How would you do it? It would be nice to be able to put up some pints for myself. Thank both of you for sharing your efforts so that others can learn. Keep up the good work!
Pete, one thing I've always wondered is how do you determine how much water to add to rehydrate something. Have you tried taking a portion of the soup (or whatever), weighing it pre-deydration, and then post dehydration? The difference should be the weight of the water removed and what you need to add back to get the exact same mix. If you weight in grams, one gram of water is 1ml of water by measurement for rehydration. I've never seen anyone address the water amount other than a estimate of what to add.
I place a whole bag of flour in a 5 gallon bucket in it's orginal packaging(flour bag is not air tight). I place a 3000cc oxygen absorber in the bucket, cover it then use my vaccum sealer to seal the bucket. Yes, you can actually do that! Check RU-vid for tutorial) I also put a bay leaf inside the bucket to deter bugs. I use food grade buckets that I can buy used for $3 cdn with the lids. I just bought 25 buckets for $75 cdn.
I had a question about dealing with a garden harvest. Because you’re pre-freezing the food before freeze drying, can’t you just freeze everything in your refrigerator to preserve it and then slowly do the drying process that way if you had a whole bunch of vegetables that won’t last in the open air. You could just freeze everything in a freezer. I guess my question is how long can it be frozen before you can actually put it in the drying process ?
Thank you so much Pete for taking the time to answer my question. So does that affect the quality of the outcome at all? That’s good news because then you could just freeze all your stuff from your garden and take your time freeze drying. I was thinking I had to buy another freeze dryer.
