Delicious, Nutritious, and Convenient Freeze Dried Powders

Did you know that you can make baby food from freeze-dried foods? Hey Provident Preppers! I'm Kyleen and today I am really excited to share with you how we make homemade freeze-dried baby food. And I took a recent trip to one of my little grandbabies who lives across the country and one of the things that I brought for him were little bags of freeze-dried baby food. And it turns out he loves them and the parents were really excited because there's some problems when you're trying to feed a baby and introducing new foods. They only eat small quantities at once so a lot of times if you open a jar you're going to waste the rest of the food that's in that jar. Another thing is babies have a lot of allergies and sometimes you don't know what's in the baby food that you get. But when I freeze-dry this food I know exactly what I've put into that freeze dryer. And so I'm really excited to do some more for them because they like it so much. Now I've chosen to put them in these little tiny ziploc bags. Normally I would not put food in these, well not just food but for long-term storage. I wouldn't do it because the mylar is very thin and the front is a clear coating. But these are just the perfect size to toss into a diaper bag and to take somewhere with you. And also it's only going to hold enough for maybe two, three meals for the baby. And so we don't have to worry about this being open too long. So I've spent a few days freeze drying this food but I wasn't able to do this video right away. So I put the freeze-dried foods inside of these containers. Not ideal, not good for long-term storage. But because I was only going to have it last for a few days I just stuck an oxygen absorber in there and then put the lid on because we had to get through the holidays so that I could do this. What I did is I freeze-dried some squash from our garden. We took all of the flesh out of it and freeze-dried it like that. I freeze-dried Fuji apples. Yum! Fuji apples are my favorite. But I left the skin on because the skin is very nutritious and once it's ground up after it's freeze-dried you're never really going to notice the skin's in there but it's going to be more healthy. We also did frozen peas, fresh organic baby carrots, some frozen mixed vegetables, some frozen berry mix, and some frozen blueberries. Now the berry mix and the blueberries might be a little bit strong for these little guys but they would be so good mixed with some kind of baby cereal. So let's get started. Let me show you exactly what I'm going to do to change it from apples that a baby couldn't eat to really good baby food. So I'm going to use my Vitamix. You could use anything that you want. I'm going to toss this oxygen absorber. You could use a food processor or whatever. We want to do this in kind of smaller batches and these you can tell with the freeze-dried foods I mean these are really dry. They're dry enough to snap and so they're gonna be really good. Now you could put them in the regular Vitamix but I have this little container that you use to make smoothies and I like that so we're just gonna use that today. Normally I only stock 300 and 500 cc oxygen absorbers but because these packages are so tiny I needed ones that were really smaller. So these are 100 cc's and they are just fine for a quart or less and I'm putting them in this jar right away because I don't want to leave them exposed to the air. Now this is probably not even going to fill up one bag so I'm going to just take one of these oxygen absorbers and slide it in here. Now you know I know that we're talking about babies but think about the power that you have the nutritional power that you have if you freeze dry food and blend it. You could totally use it for your smoothies. If you're taking care of someone who is elderly who needs added nutrition in their foods it would actually be a really good way to provide some extra nutrition for them. Okay so this whole container full of apples has made just this little tiny ziploc bag and yet fantastic nutrition in here. This is so exciting. Now I need to seal these but before I seal them with my impulse sealer I am going to finish filling all these bags. Okay the apples turned out really well. One of the things that I learned from doing that is that once this heats up it starts to be more difficult and it clumps so you got to make sure that you don't do so many at once that it gets warm. So that's a good thing to know. Okay so now we're going to try the peas oxygen absorber in the and let's see this was a two pound bag. I don't want to overfill this. All right that turned out really good. Now see how once you grind it up there's so much less left right. So this is going to take a lot less packaging than it would if it were stored in this form. This also won't last as long because once you mill anything whether it's wheat into flour or anything you reduce the shelf life. So this definitely isn't a 25 year shelf life but we're not going for that because what we want to do is be these cute little cram babies. Okay this is a beautiful flower. Pea flower looks just amazing and I'm just I've got an oxygen absorber in each one of these and I'm going to fill them up. The one of the really cool things on these little bags is that they are zip closed so when my kids use these to feed my grandkids they will be able to just zip whatever they haven't used up inside of here and it creates an airtight container. Now we have to seal these right. So I've set the impulse sealer on a lower setting because the plastic tends to melt and the this is only I don't know I honestly I think it's maybe a three mil. It just won't take as much heat so make sure that you do that or else it'll melt. But isn't this an adorable little bag of baby food? Now it's time to do the carrots. With these these were actually fresh carrots but I blanched them before putting them into the freeze dryer. You'll notice that I'm cleaning everything between the different products and the reason why is just because when we're introducing these foods to these little tiny ones we want to make sure that it's not cross-contaminated with anything so everything is recleaned and thoroughly dried. This is so cool. Now the whole thing full only resulted in this many carrots so you can see that it takes up a lot less space. Oh that's beautiful. That is so pretty. Okay now it's time for the mixed vegetables. I've been super pleased how everything else has turned out. I'm not sure what the color of this is going to look like but the nutrition is there. It has the green beans, the carrots, and the corn. It looks pretty. It's pretty much looks like peas right? And so that's about the whole thing blended down to about not maybe a third between a third and a half which is actually more than a lot of the other ones have. Okay the next thing I have are actually freeze-dried triple berries and these it's raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. And I and like I mentioned before I don't think that I would use these just straight up because berries are a little bit tart but they would be fantastic mixed with some oatmeal or something like that. All right what a great beautiful color. Wow that's really pretty and you know okay we're talking about baby food right now but this doesn't have to be just used for baby food. This would actually be the the different freeze-dried flowers could be amazing in different foods right as flavorings or in your smoothies or all kinds of of things. So don't limit yourself. Okay and now for the blueberries. Just straight blueberries again. I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be feeding these straight. They might be fabulous oxygen absorber trash but I would just be really careful with especially when you're first introducing foods personally my personal opinion. All right let's see how these go. All right not very much powder here just a little bit. I packaged up all of the baby food and it's so beautiful in those little bags but now it's time to actually create the baby food and I'm going to use hot water. I'm just going to pour a little bit in each one of these. The consistency can change depending a lot on the age of the baby. Sometimes when you first start you're going to want to use very very thin for the baby but sometimes as they get a little bit older they like it a little bit thicker and that's one of the beautiful things about the freeze-dried food is you can change the consistency depending on what your baby prefers. Okay this is a lot of fun. They've all rehydrated really well and now I'm just going to go through and taste them. I'm looking forward to it because there should be such a fresh flavor. I love fresh peas but I can't stand canned peas. I think they're disgusting so that's the mixed vegetables. Tastes like mixed vegetables but it definitely has that fresh taste. The carrots, they taste like fresh carrots just chopped up. They still have a little bit of texture to them but that's really good. Okay the peas really seriously were amazing because they taste so fresh. This is winter squash. It's actually pretty good. It needs salt like seriously needs salt. But now for the fun stuff. Okay so this is the blueberries. The texture's a bit grainy. Is that a good word for it? But the flavor is amazing. Again I think it would be great over or mixed in with some cereal. Okay the triple berry is really tart. That one definitely should be watered down for the the little guys. And then this is the Fuji apple. That's really good. All in all I'm so excited because this baby food is going to be better than anything that they're going to be able to buy and it's something that I can do for my grandkids. So it makes me really happy. So for the question of the day, what kind of foods did you feed to your little ones? And if you could freeze dry, what food would you freeze dry to feed them? Comment below and thanks for being part of the solution.