hey everybody welcome back to the live life simple kitchen today i'm going to
show you how to make something that has changed my freeze drying experiences
forever because today we're going to freeze dry some oranges and we're going to freeze dry some
lemons we're going to powder both of these we're going to juice both of these and then rehydrate
we're going to do some slices and we're also going to do some freeze-dried orange zest and
some freeze-dried lemon zest which has just changed my culinary experiences all together
so to fill up these first two trays i'm putting our pre-cut parchment down
because i'm just going to do some some lemon slices and some orange slices and when you're
doing any kind of fruit or vegetable that has a skin on it that you've purchased from the store
you always want to try and go organic just because the stuff that is sprayed onto the skin or
really scrub these things good and try and get all that nasty stuff off there and another thing
that i oftentimes forget to mention with this parchment too is you can if you have room and
it will fit in that shelf you can actually layer the parchment and kind of get more bang for your
buck you have to be a little bit careful because if you make it too thick and not breathable enough
it's going to really extend your cycle time in this case our orange and our lemon slices are cut
pretty thin but on top we're actually going to add our extra lemon peels and our extra orange peels
like to see if we can figure something to do with those i really like to utilize everything if we
possibly can and speaking of that most people do not use the peel of a lemon or an orange but we
have discovered in the last few months we've been cooking with zest a lot and it has just completely
changed some of the recipes that we use it for it adds so much flavor even just a little pinch like
that makes such a huge difference so i'm gonna i'm gonna freeze dry some orange and some lemon zest
because we've been using this so much that it would it's really just become kind of just
a spice that we could use just like just like we do a lot of things in the kitchen
so there's that i'm just going to add this onto this top tray i'm not going to do a whole bunch
because i want to make sure that it's going to work i don't see any reason why it wouldn't
now for our third tray i'm just going to do pieces of our oranges and our lemons
all right our last two trays are reserved for some homemade orange juice and some homemade lemonade
and i'm actually going to use the vitamix you can use a regular blender as well
the vitamix it will kind of grind up all of that pulp and all that stuff it also allows
you to put some of the parts and pieces that are pretty difficult to get with a regular blender
so the first thing we need to do to these oranges we need to take the skins off i like to just take
the ends off like that and then we're just going to slowly take all of that skin off the outside
just like that it's not that big a deal if you leave some of that white pith part on there that
can actually just go right into the vitamix so two oranges we're going to add half a cup of water
and then 30 seconds later you have fresh orange juice
i'm going onto our silicone mats from freeze drying supplies
it looks like i'm probably gonna have to double maybe triple this recipe to fit on a large tray
so i'm going to do that right now so i think this is probably full enough for this experiment at
least i used four oranges and half a cup of water in the vitamix that could all be done
in one little one mixing i don't really want to push it any farther than that i have heard people
have issues with orange juice where they have to water it down because it's sugary
but this is homemade orange juice i don't think it should be as big of a problem maybe not even
a problem at all let's move on to our lemonade and this is where things are going to get interesting
because obviously lemons are extremely sour and we know sugar doesn't do well in the freeze dryer
so what i've used in the past is stevia stevia is a plant it grows in the ground
and you can also grow stevia and i've grown it in the past
i had every intention of actually growing some this summer and freeze drying the leaf itself
to make my own stevia that you can just like what you can buy at the store but it would be
uh organic and home grown but my stevia plants just did not grow this summer so
here we go here's here's the box there's lots of different companies that make this but this
is what we're going to use so what we're going to do is just take the end off of these lemons
you're going to cut it lengthwise and then we're going to quarter them
and really what you're trying to do is take the pith out which is
this white spot that's also where the seeds are usually at so you want to take those out as well
we're going to do that with two lemons and then for this next part
brace yourselves we're going into the vitamix with the whole wedge that's right everything
then we're going to add 5 cups of water
and 12 teaspoons of stevia if anyone has freeze-dried stevia
let me know down in the comments section i'd love to hear about it and what you end up with is real
lemonade and that recipe that i just gave you should do two large trays so normally i would
pre-freeze my trays especially liquids today i'm not going to i'm just going to go right into
the freeze dryer with them i am going to try my dividers though because i think it would be cool
to have a portion that you could just rehydrate if you just wanted to make one single serving or
one single drink or whatever so we're going to try that out and before i get too carried away
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well i'm pleasantly surprised that this only took 32 hours and 43 minutes it's a lot shorter than i
thought it was gonna be and from what i can tell very little foam up which is usually a problem
with uh orange juice and sugary type things but you can see the orange juice there's actually
no foam at all and we're going to take these upstairs and take a closer look at them our orange
juice looks really really nice same thing on the lemonade our fruit chunks of lemon and our fruit
chunks of the orange there's just our peel of the orange and our peel of the lemon orange zested
very nice as did the lemon zest and there are our lemon slices and our orange slices but man look
at those that's just a that's a pretty picture there and i'm going to run both of these powders
through a food processor to get a very fine powder and then we're gonna figure out a formula on how
to rehydrate these so for the lemonade the best mix that i have found if you don't want
it to be too lemony is about a third cup of our powder and eight ounces or one cup of water and
then if you need to adjust your sweetness or your sourness of the lemon then you would just
change up your ratios of your water versus your powder or just add more stevia for sweetness
that's tasty need some ice but what if it's cocktail hour
add a little vodka and now you have
a hard lemonade i will say my recipe is pretty lemony because i like the lemon pulp and i like
kind of the natural flavor of the lemon if you like a sweeter lemonade then you're
going to want to use more than 12 teaspoons of stevia stevia is a very potent sweetener but
it's also easy to overdo the stevia so if you want to play it safe you could always just
add the stevia in afterwards as well our recipe that we did today should yield you
eight cups of lemonade i think on our oj our correct mixture should be about a half cup
of powder and one cup or eight ounces of water
that's pretty tasty i want to mention a couple things about the orange juice though it's going
to vary a whole lot just depending on your oranges just depending on how sweet they are some oranges
are not sweet this the oranges that i used for this were not very sweet the other thing is
orange powder and somewhat the lemon powder it tends to absorb the moisture in the air very very
quickly because it's pretty much like a sponge you have to work quickly with it because it will want
to absorb moisture very very quickly the last thing i want to mention though how cool is it
that you can just have a glass of orange juice when you're camping or something like that i'm
really looking forward to that and if you want to make a screwdriver just add an ounce or two
of vodka to that orange juice mixture next i want to check out this zest this is the lemon zest
and then i also just want to taste one of the ends of the lemons with the white stuff in there
i think you could powder on the lemons i think you could powder the end
and just uh you could use that as a zest you wouldn't even need to zest it the zest
surprisingly is less potent than the end or the the peel would be so i think from now on going
forward i think i'm just going to grind up the peels throw those in a food processor let's see if
that was the case with the oranges as well i don't think the orange does as well as the lemon does
you definitely get the zest flavor but it just doesn't seem to have the same kick as
fresh orange zest does but i'll try it in some cooking and see i'll give you an
update later on that i want to try just the raw fruit next i think i'm going to do the
orange first because if i do the lemon first i'm probably not going to be able to taste the orange
wow the orange is very very intense and i know in the past we've kind of discussed how
freeze drying actually intensifies flavor definitely the case with the orange
let's see what it does for the lemon wow yeah definitely the case for the lemon
that is harsh and we saved the best for last because it's five o'clock somewhere so i'm going
to add some orange pieces and maybe a slice of orange and cover it up with this blue moon
one of my favorite beers and it goes really well with orange all right well today's experiment was
a fun one and a good one i learned a lot on this one everything ended up working really really well
and i think there's actually a lot more uses than i originally started with on this video but i have
learned that you have to work very fast because even these oranges right here they've only been
sitting out for i don't know 15 minutes and they're starting to get a little bit spongy
already so if you're gonna use these work quick i hope you guys had as much fun as i did today
in the meantime this is retired at 40 remember to live life simple we'll catch you next week