Food Storage: Freeze Dried Raw Eggs

It's springtime and we have an abundance of eggs so we're going to freeze dry them. Hi I'm Jonathan and I'm Kyleen and we are the Provident Preppers. Today we are going to freeze dry some of our beautiful farm fresh eggs because it's springtime and we have an abundance of them and that will enable us to be able to use them during times when we don't have the fresh eggs So what we've found as we've experimented with this before is that we're not going to put them on the freeze dry trays inside the house. We're going to slide those trays inside the freeze dryer and then dump the eggs in there just to avoid the mess. Not that I have a history of making a mess or anything like that. Yeah I have no history of making a mess. So and the other thing with farm fresh eggs actually sometimes you have a little surprise when you crack the egg. And for those of you that aren't familiar with farm fresh eggs do you see how beautiful and dark that yolk is? That tells you that it's rich in vitamins nutrients and flavor. So these are really precious to us but we'll crack them one at a time and put them into the blender like that just to make sure that we don't get any bad eggs. If you notice all of our shells will be going in this bucket because those are incredibly powerful for use in the garden because of all of the minerals and everything that's in them. So we always make sure that we repurpose those eggs. So there's typically about four eggs in a cup. These trays hold about four cups each so about 16 eggs will go on each tray and we will have those for a time when maybe eggs aren't quite as abundant. Now we've got the Vitamix full of eggs we're going to blend that just for a short time on low speed just enough to get it smoothed out. So here we go. Okay we'll take these out and put them on the trays in the freeze dryer. With the trays in the freeze dryer we are now going to put the egg onto the trays and just making sure that we don't overfill these and we'll want all of the trays to be filled to the same depth so that it will freeze dry evenly. This is a batch of eggs it says it only took 20 hours and 15 minutes but that can't be right so I've got to figure out what's wrong with the meter. It took 21.63 kilowatt hours and do you see these little guys? It's springtime and so we every year we want to get a new little crop of chicks so this time there's nine of them and they're all the same variety so that we will know when we start to rotate the chickens a few years from now which of the chickens are getting old. It's really hard when they're all the same variety to know which of the hens aren't laying anymore. So here are adorable little chicks. Since we don't like to waste anything we're going to take these egg shells and crush them up and just compost them. Some people like to dry them out and grind them up and feed them back to the chickens to supplement their calcium but we just prefer to take them out and compost them in our garden. We've got these eggs out of the freeze dryer. My meter said they took 20 hours but it was more like a day and a half so that should have been maybe 40 hours. Maybe a little more but anyway it is what it is. I'll figure that part out and let's talk about the the eggs. So they're beautiful. They're kind of, how would you describe this texture? Kind of a crystal. It's not a crystal. It's beautiful right? It just kind of really flakes. It's nice and dry. Does not have the really nasty smell that powdered eggs has. It smells really good. I am not going to taste this raw because these are raw eggs and I'm not a fan of raw eggs. So we're going to just put them in the bowl and kind of crush them up so that they're a little bit smaller when we go to rehydrate them. I know what I want to say. They're like flakes right? They're like really pretty shiny flakes and the texture is just really nice. So we'll see how this works. Let's get them packaged up. Here's our bowl of eggs and it's actually heavier than I thought. I thought well it'll be about the same weight as like potato flakes. This is definitely a little bit more dense. And it's interesting because it feels really light right? But it is just a little bit more dense. Okay so now what we're going to do is there are, when it comes to reconstituting, there are two schools of thought. One is that you want a one-to-one ratio. So one, it's kind of hard to get just a tablespoon, one tablespoon of egg to one tablespoon of water. But so what we're going to do is we're going to cook these. So I'm going to put three tablespoons of egg in here. But then let's put six tablespoons of egg in this one. See this is six right? Six. Okay but we'll put three tablespoons of water in each one and then we're going to let it set while we package these. And then we're going to fry up some scrambled eggs and see what the difference and what we like reconstituted as. Here are the eggs that we are reconstituting. This bowl has one part egg to one part water. And you can see it's kind of looking like regular eggs would look like. This bowl is two parts egg to one part water. And it's a little bit thick. And we are going to give this just a few more minutes to see how this works out. As we're watching these reconstitute, this one's kind of thin, this one's kind of thick. So we're going to do the Goldilocks thing and we're going to try one right in the middle that we hope will be just right. So instead of three or six we're going to do four and a half tablespoons of egg. And we are going to add three tablespoons of water again. And we'll see if this comes out just perfect. Do a little stirring here to kind of get it on its way. And we'll find out what is going to work out best. These are the eggs that we are reconstituting. This bowl is the one part egg to one part water. To me that seemed a little thin, but it's not too bad. The middle one here we did one and a half parts egg to one part water. And this seems about, to me, to be about the consistency of a normal fresh egg. This we did two parts egg to one part water. And this seems kind of thick. You can see it it's just a little thick. So I think the Goldilocks approach worked. I think this one right here is probably about as close to fresh egg as you can get. As far as the amount of egg that we got, this is about 64 eggs. We didn't actually count them, but we figure four eggs per cup. And the trays hold four cups. So about 64 eggs. And we got seven, eight containers. We got eight containers including this pint jar. So that means that there's about eight, eight eggs in each one of these packages. And they're packaged for long-term storage, which is really fantastic. I don't know how long that is. I like the freeze dried eggs so much better than the powdered eggs. I actually refuse to use the powdered eggs because I think they smell so bad. But these, there's no bad smell. They reconstitute really well. They look very close to the original state. If you're doing this at home with eggs that you've purchased at the store, don't be surprised if it's not this bright of a color because our eggs are homegrown and so the yolk is very dark and rich and that's just what happens. And more flavorful. So these these will taste really good. So right now what I'd like to do is fry up all three of these and see what we think the difference is. Okay, this is our one-to-one ratio. And you can see that it's a little bit on the thin side, but overall it's it's not bad at all. So the eggs have beautiful texture, right? I probably should have stirred this one just a little bit sooner, but looks very, very much like regular eggs. Okay, so we'll take that one. This is the one-to-one-and-a-half ratio. It looks pretty good to me. Let's see how it cooks up. This is the one-to-two ratio. To me, this is just way too thick. Normal eggs don't really look like that. Yeah, this one's just too thick if you ask me. See, it just doesn't just doesn't cook up like normal. Definitely needed some more water. Okay, see it's just I don't think this one works well. I think it's ugly for one thing and it's not the texture of regular eggs. Okay, and just because I can, I think I'm going to try but now we need to taste them and see. So I cooked all of these up along with some fresh ones because you have to have the marker, right? You have to have something to put it up against. Okay, so one-to-one next. This is the one that seemed like it was a little bit thin, but the taste is good. Okay, can you taste any difference between this? Except for this one, like I should have scrambled them a little bit more because you can still see the little white in them. I can't taste the difference at all. I'm not tasting any difference. Okay, this one. This is one-to-one and a half. It's too thick. Taste this one again. The one-to-one and a half is actually too thick, isn't it? I mean they all taste like the same. Yeah. What do you think? Which one do you prefer? Do you prefer the one and a half? I actually think I do, but it probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference because we're just adding water which gets cooked out. So it's kind of a little bit more of a texture thing. Yeah. So one-to-two doesn't work. No, one-to-two doesn't work. The color's a little bit different. It's a little darker. And it's kind of rubbier. It's just like too thick. It doesn't seem to work as well. So I'm good with fresh or one-to-one or one-to-one and a half. So maybe the magic is between one and one and a half because to me the one-to-one seems a little bit lighter. We're eating a lot of eggs here. Anyway, okay. But bottom line is we can take all these additional or extra eggs that our hens are laying, especially in the springtime, and freeze dry them so that they are perfectly good to reconstitute and eat later, which is quite a blessing, I think, because eggs are a foundation in our diet. And part of it's because we have hens, but we use them for everything from baking to eating freshened things and fried rice. So and now for the question of the day. How do you like your eggs? Comment below. And thanks for being part of the solution.