Food Storage: How to Preserve Zucchini for Long Term Storage by Dehydrating or Freeze Drying

It's summertime and are you overrun with zucchini? Let me show you two different ways that I like to preserve it so that we can use this abundance all winter long. Hi, I'm Kyleen and I'm the Provident Prepper and this time of year we are usually going crazy with zucchini. Ideally, I like to harvest mine when they look like this and they're young and they're tender and it's perfect. However, if you blink, it will look like this and so a lot of times we have zucchini that just gets away from us and what do we do with it, right? Because right now there's such a huge abundance of it but in December when I go to the market, zucchini is like $1.30, $1.50 a pound and I look at this and think, oh my gosh, like I had so much during the summer. So one of the ways that I like to preserve zucchini, especially when it's big like this, is shred it because if I had shredded it, I have a whole variety of things that I can do with it. I like to put it in different baked goods, whether it's pancakes or muffins or different things like that. I also, if it's been dried or freeze-dried, I will make it into a flour and I use that to kind of sneak nutrition into different baked goods that we have. I also like to use it in soups or salads, casseroles, just anywhere that I can sneak a little bit of additional nutrition into a dish and so it seems like such a shame to let this go to waste. So there are really three main ways that I like to do it. The first one is freezing and I shred it. I will put it in a big bowl with water and a little bit of salt and what the salt does is it draws out the moisture. So I think it just makes a better final product and then I will drain it really well and I will put it in a freezer bag. Now I know that there's a lot of people who like to blanch it first and that is the recommended way to do it and how you do that is you put salt and water, you bring it to a nice rolling boil and then you put the zucchini in there and just until it turns bright green. It's like two minutes and then immediately you pull it out, you drain it and you rinse it with cold water. Okay, I'm lazy. I don't usually do that and it seems to work fine with me. I might have a better product if I did but I don't usually do that. So the first way was freezing and then the next way is dehydrating and same thing. I started out with just shredding it all, putting it in the water with the salt to get draw out all of that, not all of the moisture but some of the moisture and then I spread it on dehydrator trays and put it in the dehydrator. Now the other way that I'll do it is to use our solar dryer. Now that takes longer and right now quite frankly I can't use our solar dryer because we're going through this period where we have a lot of rain which is a great blessing but usually during this time of year the solar dryer works perfectly because when we have rain it's only for a few hours and it moves on. Now in order to have any vegetable that's a good candidate for long-term storage it has to snap, right? It cannot be moist at all. It just has to be able to snap because if you put an oxygen absorber in with vegetables or fruits that are moist you create an environment where botulism might grow because it needs that moisture. However if we do it with dry vegetables then we can make them shelf stable for a very long period of time. So these are really dry when I took them out of the dehydrator. Now I've conditioned them which meant that I put them in this airtight container and every day I just came and shook it a little bit because we want to make sure that the moisture is evenly distributed in there. Now we don't want it moist, right? But it just kind of levels it out a little bit. So these are about a week old and so we've given it plenty of time to do that and the first thing I like to do then this is just personal preference for me so you could use little mylar bags to do this or you can use the bottles which I love the bottles because I think it actually looks really pretty but I put the oxygen absorber in the bottom just because that way I can fill it completely to the top and it's easier to get that oxygen absorber in. It really doesn't make a difference where you put it in. The other thing that you could do is you could vacuum seal this right? Vacuum sealing works great. You don't have to use the oxygen absorber and if you want you can use both. I tend to think that's a little bit of overkill although sometimes with the freeze-dried foods but most of the time I just prefer to use an oxygen absorber as long as I have it available and I'm a little bit brutal here because I don't care so much what this looks like the final shape. If I had sliced these I would care a lot about the final shape. Right now I just want to make sure that I can get as much in the jar as I can so I will definitely tap it down and then before I seal it I am just going to wipe the rim of this jar. The reason I need to wipe it is because if you have a little piece of zucchini that stops this lid from making full contact the jar is not going to seal well and then the oxygen absorber is not going to work and it's just not going to be good for long-term storage. So that is all it takes to be able to store this. There's the oxygen absorber in there, nice good seal on it. Right now you can hear this popping. Within 6 to 12 hours the oxygen absorber will absorb all the oxygen in this jar and suck that lid down and that's just an indication that it's done its job. Now this will need to be protected from light because light will degrade the food but other than that you can get a really good long shelf life if you store this in a cool dry dark place. The cooler the temperature the longer it stores. Okay so now let's move on to my favorite way which is freeze drying but while I having said that these are very comparable. So we'll do a little test and you'll see the difference between freeze dried and dried once it's reconstituted but the freeze dried to me maintains well maintains more than nutritional value for sure but it's more of the original color and texture. Dried it definitely changes it but freeze dried also takes up a lot more space. There is probably two to three times as much zucchini in this jar as there is in the freeze dried jar and you can kind of tell that even just by weight. We've packaged a couple jars of the dehydrated zucchini shreds in jars but we can also package them in mylar. We don't want to same thing we want to put an oxygen absorber in. These happen to be some bags from Harvest Right. They're mylar bags. They're really cool because they have the zip at the top and the gusset at the bottom so you can actually put more in it and I do the same thing. I like to make sure I get as much in as possible so that I don't waste storage space. Okay now and a lot of people ask me what size oxygen absorbers I use and quite frankly I I use 300 cc for anything a gallon or less. Now right now these are actually 500 cc's because I was able to get a really good deal on some that were already packaged. They're in packs of 10 and they're 500 cc so you can use more oxygen absorbers than what you need because the chemical process will stop once the oxygen is absorbed but you can't use less. Okay and then this is just called an impulse sealer. We've got a nice seal on this. This bag of dried zucchini should be good for many years if it's stored in a cool dry location so whatever your preference is as long as it's an airtight container in a low oxygen environment it works. Okay this is what the zucchini looks like when it first comes out of the freeze dryer. You can hear how just it it's very very dry it snaps so what we do is we're going to package this up with an oxygen absorber either in the canning jars or in a mylar bag and this freeze dried this way seriously can last for 25 years in your storage if it's stored in a cool dry dark location. Now food is always better when you rotate it so our goal is not to package this away for 25 years it's just comforting to know that it can last that long. Let's talk about how we can use the dried or the freeze dried zucchini. So we can turn it into a flour and this is a great option. I just loaded this little coffee grinder with it and then in just about a minute I have flour. I have vegetable flour which is totally cool. Now watch I'm going to finish the rest of this yeah you're going to get flour all over in the air but I'm going to finish the rest of this and I want you to see how little it grinds down into. So the result of this which when it started out was about two-thirds of the way full has condensed just into this little area. Now you might want to think well I want to store it all in flour then but I wouldn't do that because milled products because you break it down into such small pieces will not store as long. For instance you can store wheat for 30 years or more without a problem but once it's in the flour form even now you can't store whole wheat flour that hasn't enriched for longer than just a few days but a white flour really only has about a five-year shelf life and is it edible past then? Yes but it's not as good and it's lost a lot of its value but if you look at this it's really cool. Think of the potential right? You could do this with this little coffee grinder or a food processor or a Vitamix. There's all kinds of different ways that you could make this flour but now you could stir it into any kind of baked good right and nobody would even know zucchini was there because it takes on the flavor of whatever it's with. You could put it in a fruit smoothie. You could add it as a thickener in a gravy or a soup. The potential is just limitless so this is really kind of a cool way to sneak some nutrition into some of your food. Okay before we get started cooking which is our favorite part we need to have some fresh zucchini to compare it to and so that's what I'm going to do right here. So you can just leave these seeds in here but I really don't like to. I did save some seeds for planting next year but it's really easy to get rid of it and then you don't have you know you've got this real consistent texture if you don't have those seeds in there. Now when I was doing the massive amounts of zucchini at once I used a food processor but I don't want to get out just for this small amount of zucchini that we'll be doing today. So I'm just cutting it into manageable pieces. I like to leave the skin on. You don't have to but I think the color variant is really beautiful and there's a lot of nutrition in the skin too and because we grow organic I don't have to worry about any pesticides. I put a little bit of salt in the water because it's going to draw out that moisture and that's what I want for this recipe. Okay so we have our three types of shredded zucchini. This is fresh, this is dehydrated and this is freeze-dried. Now if you notice there are more freeze-dried ones in this cup than there is dehydrated because I anticipate for the dehydrated ones to expand more. So we won't add any water to the fresh but I'm going to add water to the dehydrated and to the freeze-dried and we're just going to let these rehydrate before we get ready to make our fritters. Okay this is our control group. It's the four cups of fresh zucchini that's been shredded. We soaked in a little bit of salt water and we rinsed it. Now this is the dehydrated zucchini. We only filled this about halfway full right there were only two cups in here and it really expanded a lot and it looks really good and it smells good. This is the freeze-dried. Now there is a full four cups of freeze-dried shredded zucchini in here and once it was rehydrated there's much less of it. So it's really interesting and when we're storing the product I think it's really important to remember the freeze-dried food while the quality is incredible it's going to take up more space than dehydrated food. So in these bowls we have there's egg, garlic, whole wheat flour, some parmesan cheese, some salt and some pepper and we're just going to make some fritters so that we can see exactly what tastes really good right and the difference in the texture in the finished recipe. So we'll get busy doing this and fry them up and then we'll have our little taste test. The fresh is on the upper left hand side. The freeze-dried is on the right hand side and the dehydrated it's on the bottom. Okay our first batch of fritters is done. Now this one right here is the zucchini, the fresh zucchini. This one's the dehydrated zucchini and this one is the freeze-dried zucchini. So which one do you want to try first? Try this one. All right I'm going to try the dehydrated one. The zucchini is a little bit chewy still. I probably should have rehydrated it longer. Definitely tastes like squash. Okay let's try the freeze-dried one. That seemed to rehydrate it a little bit better. Yeah it's not as crunchy and I'm not sure if that's because it's freeze-dried or because it's dehydrated. I think it might have just been user error on my part. Okay and now the fresh. The fresh is a little bit crispy right? A little bit yeah. So it's a little bit different than either of them. Which one do you like best? Either the fresh or the freeze-dried. They're both very good. I mean they're all three really good. This just is not quite as as uh rehydrated. It's more a little bit chewier. Yeah yeah. Okay but definitely okay right? I like the flavor in this recipe. A whole wheat flour, parmesan cheese, eggs, garlic from our garden. We have such good garlic. Anyway so and now for the question of the day. So how do you like to preserve and or use your zucchini? Comment below and thanks for being part of the solution.