hey guys retired at 40 it's been a minute since I've done a freeze-dried
video so today we're doing a freeze-dried video for all the people
that are on just a plant-based diet so about a year ago today I was in to the
doctor and he told me that I had high blood pressure and I already knew that I
had high cholesterol it was genetic in my family and I asked a few people
what I could do I asked the doctor what I could what I could do and he told me
to cut down on dairy and cut down on meat so I didn't completely cut it out
but I did cut it down quite a bit and since then I've lost about 10 pounds my
blood pressure has gone down dramatically my cholesterol has gone
down down dramatically and I have a lot more energy and I feel like I feel a lot
better so not only have I changed in my diet but I've changed a lot of the
things that I cook because I'm starting to cook more plant-based foods so that
brings me to what we are freeze-drying today so one of the biggest complaints I
have since cutting down on my meat intake is that it's really hard to
replace a meat with something that doesn't taste like something that's
supposed to be replacing me so I found a pretty good solution it's called seitan
and it's kind of a dough based substance that you infuse with different types of
broth you can do chicken you can do vegetable you can do beef you can do
pork stock but the consistency of what it is is very similar to meat and I
think a lot of people would never even be able to tell I'm just gonna load up a
tray with chunks and then I'm gonna do the bigger size too and this stuff is
porous enough that I think it will be fine with without having to cut it or
make it any smaller than it is
so this is sort of bread like and usually bread does not do well in the
freeze dryer but just because of the way this it is I think it's actually gonna
reconstitute really well its shelf life in a refrigerator is not very long maybe
a couple weeks at best so it'd be great to be able to just make a gigantic batch
of this and just kind of use it as you need it
you can also see that I'm putting these pretty close together because I think
once the the moisture is back out of these I think that they will probably
shrink back down again so you might be asking what's next well no vegetarian or
vegan or plant-based diet would be complete without some tofu and stay what
you will but tofu works in a lot of different situations and it's real
inexpensive but I will say as I started making the seitan I don't use tofu
anymore to me it's got a lot more flavor and it works a lot better in many
situations but it does have the same problem as tofu does where it doesn't
store very long so freeze drying is going to be really helpful for tofu so
I'm just going to dice it up into cubes because that's usually how you use it
anyway and tofu has a almost the same consistency of the seitan
okay I'm gonna stick these in the deep freeze and then we're actually going to
freeze some almond milk too so I'll bring it
almond milk out and fill my tray outside so the next thing we're gonna do is make
some cashew milk you can also use almond milk which I have a video on I'll put a
link down below and show you how to make that it's real simple I'll give you the
quick version here pretty much two cups of cashews I've boiled these or you can
let them soak overnight but you have the cashews to a high-power blender and then
four cups of water and then you just blend it smooth so we tend to make the
cashew milk more than the almond milk because this is all there is to it you
don't have to strain it there's nothing else ready you can just put this in the
fridge and use it
all right I've got one empty tray left and that reminds me of something that I
keep forgetting to do in the videos and that's to weigh the trays a harvest
right stainless steel brand tray weighs one pound 10 ounces so just use that for
your benchmark in the future all right add one more tray left so I filled it up
with butter cauliflower which was my recipe for earlier in the week and I'm
gonna go ahead and add this to the Deep Freeze as well so we got all four trays
ready to go I'm gonna start my pre-freeze cycle on the freeze dryer and
then we're gonna go check on our frozen food all right everything looks good
tofu is kind of interesting and turned a like a brown color but everything else
is frozen solid I'm going to take a second and I'm gonna weigh this now that
it's frozen before we put it into the freeze dryer
okay so first I'm going to do the tofu and remember our trays weighed 1 pound
10 ounces so with the tofu on there and frozen at 3 pounds nine and a half
ounces and the seitan is three pounds 10 ounces so it added about 2 pounds the
cashew milk is 4 pounds 4 ounces and the butter cauliflower is 3 pounds 12 ounces
so if you get in habit of weighing things before and after you freeze dry
then you will know the exact equivalent of water that you need to put back into
the food to get it to the point that it was
and now we're all done I'll see you guys in a while
all right so we're all doing it talking about 36 hours for our process
seitan tofu or cashew milk and our butter cauliflower all right so let's weigh
these after the cycle and get our first look at what this stuff looks like
there's the tofu it's very light and airy now and now it's only weighing one
pound 15 ounces it basically only weighs 5 ounces more than the tray does all
right next is the seitan 2 pounds and 5 ounces about four and a half five ounces
and these look very similar to a crouton for a salad and they're very light very
porous now you can see all the pores all right the almond milk or the cashew
milk I should say shrunk up quite a bit you can see around all the edges you can
see where it actually shrunk down very powdery just like all the other milk
that we've done but it does have a little bit different texture than the
regular milk and our weight is two pounds three ounces and last is our
butter cauliflower I'm really curious to see how the rice does it's it's a lot
fluffier than it normally would be before you cook it so ideally you could
you could just put this back into hot water and it would be like cooked rice
already and the weight is two pounds one ounce so I'm gonna do the cashew milk
first because it's a no-brainer you just add water and it's ready to go
so we're gonna give that a test we'll give it a taste test and see how it
worked I'm gonna make a little homemade funnel make this a little bit easier
cashew milk is a lot thicker it seems like then when I did the whole milk and
2% milk it almost feels like it's not dry but it's just because it's it's more
thick it doesn't get quite as flaky
so I've heard of people running this through a blender or food processor
before they actually try and reconstitute it so I'm gonna give that a
shot
that actually worked really well it's more like powdered milk now and it will
definitely help it reconstitute evenly I went ahead and added some water to the
bottom just so everything doesn't stick to the bottom I'm just gonna pour this
back in so that looks good to me gonna give it a good shake it's great
it's just the way you want it alright so I'm gonna do the tofu and the seitan
next I'm gonna fill up some ball jars as full as I can get them for storage and
then I'll reconstitute the rest and save the rest for dinners of the rest of the
week and like I said I like the seitan a lot better than the tofu now that I've
made it because it just comes in more useful it tastes better and the texture
is a lot more meat like if you're making a stir fry or something like that so if
you used to using tofu I would probably recommend trying to do at least at least
try and make the seitan at least once just to see if it works for you as well
as we like it so the seitan is really really really dense now that it's
freeze-dried it's incredibly hard so if you tried to you're trying to eat it now
it's like really really dry it's one of those things that you eat and you just
want to drink a glass of water with it on the plus side of that I would say it
would store incredibly well and I think long-term storage it would do really
really well so I've got quite a few people recommend
a steamer to reconstitute some things and I think this is a good case of where
we need a steamer so I've had a steamer for a while I haven't really tried to to
rehydrate anything other than cheese at one time but I think this is since these
are so dense and they're porous and you kind of need to keep them in their shape
that they are I think that a steamer will apply very well to this doing the
tofu on the bottom seitan and the top I'm gonna give it about 20 minutes
normally you do vegetables about 10 to 14 minutes but I think since there's
absolutely no moisture in there it's probably gonna take a little bit longer
so we'll give these we'll let these chill here for a little bit and then
we'll check back in on them so for the butter cauliflower I want to do the
entire tray and I want to put our weight method to test so we know the weight
before and we know the weight after now so I'm gonna waste some water that would
make up the difference and add that that much water to the pan and see if it
turns out to the same consistency as it did before
all right so in order to figure out how much water we need to add back in we
need to figure out so the before weight sitting on the tray was three pounds 12
ounces if you subtract the tray weight out of one pound 10 ounces that gives
you 2 pounds 2 ounces the after the cycle weight sitting on the tray was 2
pounds one ounce and when you subtract the tray weight from that of 1 pound 10
ounces you get 7 ounces which is pretty amazing if you think about it because if
you were using this for backpacking or camping or something like that where you
where you really didn't want to have a lot of weight 7 ounces is is practically
nothing all you'd have to do is find a water source to rehydrate it ok so you
need the difference between 2 pounds 2 ounces and 7 ounces which has 1 pound 11
ounces so I think the most simple way to do this is just with a kitchen scale so
we want to go 2 pounds and ounces and I'm just going to keep adding water
until I hit one pound 11 ounces all right so there's 1 pound which looks
like it's about 2 cups of water now we'll go for our 11 ounces
turn the cooktop on to medium heat and then we're gonna go check on the steamer
all right so our bell just went off and these are still pretty tough and same on
the bottom so I'm gonna go ahead and stick these in for a little bit longer
all right this has been on for about twelve or thirteen minutes it thickened
up really really nice I thought it was gonna be kind of watery there for a
little bit but it turned out great the cauliflower it's you're definitely not
going to get the crunch that you got before in the cauliflower all in all it
turned out really good so the tofu and the seitan have been in for about 35
minutes and the tofu looks like it's finally starting to take some water in
the the seitan does not you might have to boil the seitan again since it was
boiled originally the texture of it is really dense and I think that it's gonna
take quite a bit to get water inside of it well the seitan is still pretty mushy
it's been in for 40 minutes now the the tofu is still just about the same way I
think if you maybe threw it into a stir-fry with some oil and some water it
would probably help it quite a bit I'm gonna go ahead and throw them in for
another 20 minutes or so just for the heck of it all right well we've been in
for sixty minutes now and the seitan is just still pretty hard there's no doubt
in my mind it just needs to be boiled again to bring it back the tofu is about
50/50 still some of its real soft and mushy some of it's still really sponge
like well everything turned out really good I think I've got another camping
meal for sure this one turned out great add some Frank's wing sauce to it it's
awesome if you're looking for the recipes for anything that was in this
video I will put them down in the description as well remember to give me
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