Recipes using dehydrated foods please

I’ve been experimenting with dehydration and doing quite well. I have a few basic recipes using produce and cheese I’ve dehydrated myself but…. not nearly enough…. a vegetable beef soup recipe, scalloped potatoes, and a cheese sauce. That’s it and… I’ve made them using what I’ve dehydrated myself. These recipes worked well, very well. I found one website with a few recipes using dehydrated foods but I’ve not tried any myself, Dehydrate2Store.com | Recipes. There’s little available on the internet in the way of recipes. I know lots of folk here dehydrate. I’m sure everyone’s been rotating food in their pantries using what they have been stocking. I could sure use more experience cooking with dehydrated foods so if anyone has recipes their family’s like eating…. I’d be most appreciative. Main meal recipes please. We don't eat many desserts and never have.

 

Personally, the expense of pre-packaged does not outweigh the benefit. I'd rather carry home-made "MRE" meals or create my own dehydrated meal packs - sealed and stashed in my bags with a food saver. - With creating your own, you know what goes in it and have no artificial this and extra salt that, and by and far NO artificial colors.

One of my favorites is Meat Stew Pouch for one (makes two meals for an active person - double or triple or whatever as needed)-

Combine 1 cup dehydrated meat ( I prefer dehydrated hamburger, but dehydrated ground chicken/turkey/venison does well)

1/3 cup each dehydrated onion flakes, carrots, onions, celery (leave or stems - I use both), potatoes, peppers, etc - use your imagination.

Commercial preparations like "Stew Starter" or "Soup Starter" work fine also. If using soup/stew starter - skip the below ingredients, follow the directions on the package and use re-hydrated dehydrated meat (2 cups boiling water to 1 cup dehydrated meat - makes the equivalent to 1 pound cooked meat).

4 Tbsp Tomato powder (make your own by dehydrating or sun drying tomatoes and grinding the resultant dried bits in a CLEAN rotary blade coffee grinder - store in a jar/vac bag/bottle)
2 tbsp garlic powder (or more if you like)
3 tbsp dried parsley
4 Tbsp beef bullion powder (adds umph to the taste)
Salt and Pepper to taste (I add some red pepper flake to mine to give it bite and kick, but that is me).

Combine all the bulky ingredients in a pre-prepared vacuum seal bag. fold bag over mix well. Put all the powdered ingredients in a zip-top sandwich bag and fold closed (DO NOT SEAL IT). Wrap the sandwich bag with a paper towel and place on top of bulky ingredients. Vacuum Seal, date and stash.

To prepare it, bring 6 cups water (approx) to a boil. Cut open your pack, remove the "seasoning bag" and dump in the meat and veggie mix, bring back to a boil then lower heat, add the seasoning packet and simmer until the veggies are completely rehydrated, adding water if needed.

Country "Omlette" Scrambled Eggs

I use powdered whole eggs (commercially prepared). They are light and can be used for cooking, baking etc. You can experiment with dehydrated scrambled eggs, but they are bulky and take more room than powdered.

This is for one person - double or triple if there are more people. Each ingredient should be sealed in it's own small bag then combined into a large pack. This recipe is a PER PERSON recipe. For 2 people double the ingredients when preparing. 3 people triple the ingredients.

1st pack - eggs and meat -
4 Tbsp powdered whole eggs & 2 tbsp (or more if you like) REAL bacon bits or dehydrated ham bits
2 tbsp onion powder or dehydrated onion bits (I like the powder - no muss no fuss)

2nd pack - Taters
1/3 cup dehydrated "hash brown" style potatoes

3rd pack condiment - Sour Cream
3 tbsp powdered sour cream

Not in Vac pack, but kept in BOB

Canned butter (approx 6 Tbsp - or more if you like - 4 for the taters, 2 for the eggs, INCREASE THIS ALSO IF YOU INCREASE THE RECIPE)

Recipe -
Put the hash browns in a container (we use a medium sized camping pan). Pour just enough BOILING water over the hash browns to cover them. Let soak for 15 minutes.

About 5 minutes before the hash browns are ready, preheat your skillet (you do have cooking stuff like camping skillet or griddle right?). Melt the 2 Tbsp of the butter and cook re-hydrated potatoes in skillet (like regular skillet hash browns - press the potatoes into the skillet, and cook until well browned. Using a plate or the lid of the skillet (if it is relatively flat) flip the skillet so the potatoes fall onto the plate/lid so the bottom (brown side is up). Replace the skillet on the heat, melt another 2 Tbsp butter and slip the potatoes back into the skillet. Cook until bottom is well browned. Slide out onto plate/lid and set to the side. Wipe out the skillet and rehydrate your sour-cream by slowly adding water and stirring until it is the consistency you want (thicker - less water, thinner - more water. I like mine thick). Set aside. In a cup/bowl combine the egg/meat/onion powder packet with 8 tbsp water (you can optionally rehydrate with 8 tbsp of milk made from powdered whole milk), and stir until the eggs are fully re-hydrated. Melt 2 tbsp of canned butter in your skillet and cook the eggs in the melted butter until done. Take the hash browns, slide them back into the skillet with the eggs, remove from heat. Mix the hash browns and eggs together and slather the top with the sour cream, salt and pepper to taste.

Enjoy breakfast.

And one more:
Adapted Spicy Chicken Corn Chowder

This is a simple one-pouch-one-pot meal for two people. Double for four, triple for six etc. If you know how to make Johnny Cakes (hoe cakes) and have the ingredients (cornmeal, water and salt) on hand it makes an excellent side.

Ingredients:
1 Cup dehydrated ground chicken (see my meat stew recipe)
1/4 cup bacon (Real Bacon) bits
1 cup dehydrated corn
1 Tbsp dehydrated chopped jalepeno (I dry mine with seeds and membranes, I like it hot)
1/4 cup dehydrated diced onion
1/4 cup dehydrated diced red (bell) pepper
1 1/2 Tbsp dried thyme
3 tbsp chicken bullion powder
1/2 cup dehydrated (cube style preferred) potatoes
1/3 cup powdered whole milk
4 cups water
Salt & pepper to taste (not much needed usually, bullion is salty, but the taters are bland).

Combine all ingredients in a vac bag, put a couple of folded paper towels at the top to help hold in the powdered ingredients.

Just another little tip: the paper towels packaged with these dehydrated food packs are handed out as napkins around my fire. Put enough in to serve the # of people who can eat from your pack (2 for 2 people, 4 for 4 people etc.).

Bring water to boil and add ingredients, stir to dissolve all the powdered ingredients. Simmer gently and add water as needed until the potatoes (the hardest dried ingredient) is completely reconstituted.

Be careful to add more water as needed, and watch for scorching the milk in the chowder. Cook on a cooler part of your fire grate or lower temp on your propane stove, and let it simmer gently. If you like it thicker, you can add a corn starch or arrow root slurry just after the potatoes are done to thicken it, but I prefer straight out of the bag. If you don't have the corn starch or arrow root, you can just cook it down by 1/4 and that should thicken it nicely.

Damn I fell like imitating Julia Childs:
BON APPETIT!

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Exactly what I wanted. Thank you.
The first one is great for right now. I dehydrated meat before but it didn't rehydrate well. This afternoon I tried again and I think I've got the process down by adding bread crumbs to the meat before browning it so.... I'll try your meat stew pouch probably this weekend.
I haven't experimented with dehydrating eggs yet. I would think that dehydrated eggs could be put through a food processor and reduced to a powder though. I'll have to try dehydrating eggs real soon so I can try your #2. Come to think of it... I'll have to look up how to dehydrate sour cream.
#3 I can try soon too since I do have thyme handy. I've dehydrated everything on your ingredients list except that. I do have corn starch and arrowroot. I cook a lot.

 

I purchase powdered eggs and sour cream from various sources - you can store them but they need to be rotated religiously. Many camping outfitters have them available. Powdered eggs are NOT dehydrated eggs per-se, they are spray dried eggs. As for my "dehydrated" meat - I use this recipe/process: LINK

 

Looks very good to me in that the “meat rocks” process stores for 2 years or longer. One thing though since I’ve been looking for a non-electric meat grinder is the one they recommend isn’t sold anymore, it’s been replaced by this meat grinder, Kitchener #32 Meat Grinder with V-Belt Pulley | Meat Grinders | Northern Tool + Equipment. Here’s the way I ended up dehydrating my ground meat, [FONT=&quot]Dehydrating Meat[/FONT]. I wonder how long mine will last?

 

As to the life of the meat after dehydration...as long as it s dry and has NO fat content, it should last for years if packaged properly. At the very least, you can use the "canning" method to store the dehydrated meat.

My experience with Northern Tool stuff is: they sell cheap, not very well made stuff. Caveat Emptor (buyer beware). I checked that one out and the complaints I read ranged from the lack of a proper bearing on the shaft for powered operation to a "uneven" cast shaft that snapped under load.

The one I bought is here: LINK - about double the price, but solid as a rock. I hand ground through 20# of rump roast in 30 minutes.

 

Egads.... more than I have to spend for a few months. I borrowed an electric meat grinder. I'm learning how to dehydrate meat more so because we only buy it on sale and if we lose power again or our freezer poops out on us.... I plan on taking all the meat over to a friend's house along with my dehydrator and saving as much as I can. Your way of making the meat rocks lets me use an oven. I could have an oven and a dehydrator going at the same time next time I'm hit with a power outage or what ever. The last time this happened I ended up giving away half my freezer. I was really bummed out about it.

 

I got tagged during Hurricane Ike. Rather than panic, I invited the neighbors over for a HUGE cook-out - 5 days AFTER the power outage. A solid packed freezer that remained unopened stayed pretty well frozen. Well, it was an investment in my eyes. My neighbors appreciated the "free" cooked food, and we had a great time and wonderful fellowship. So my neighbors got fed, I didn't throw out a damn thing, and my family and I made some new friends! Always try to turn adversity into opportunity.

 

I guess a small used generator goes on my ever growing list because I'm slave to a freezer? I really need to get into rabbits or something.... meat on the paw I guess. That way I could keep only what I could afford to lose in the freezer. What I want to know is why don't we ever lose electricity longer than a day in the winter when we could use my WHOLE backyard as a freezer. Rhetorical question.
A barbecue would have been nice. I never thought of it.... I was too busy passing out food.

 

AMEN Bruce. Amen.

 

Well.... of course you're right.
The one thing about getting the well pump off the grid is that my monthly electric bills should go down at least a little bit to ease the pain of the monetary outlay and if we're ever off the grid for weeks.... we'll at least be able to flush a toilet... take cold showers.... and have potable water.

 

Ever thought about investing in or building a windmill for the well?

 

The systems I found required a DC pump. I never did get far with wind turbines which would actually be better for where I'm located. At this point.... I'm almost afraid to look online.... we did buy 6 solar panels last weekend. I guess if I looked I'd probably find the windmill of my dreams that was on sale for like 2.5k or something. Seriously.... I'm afraid to look right about now.

 

Would somebody please eyeball this for me, No. 32 Meat Grinder Sausage Stuffer Maker Pulley - eBay (item 160533474702 end time Feb-15-11 14:26:25 PST). It appears to be the exact same meat grinder Amazon is selling for more and the shipping is less too. I'm just curious. I can't buy it right now.

 

thank all yall so much i just bought a dehydrator and im looking for anything to use it and then use my stock to keep it rotating

 

Dehydrated food recipes galore

What a splendid idea.... I did a google search and found quite a few references to dehydrated food recipes...I hope the resources linked will give you and others some good ideas and inspiration.

Google

Google

Google

http://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&scl...f.,cf.osb&fp=438c73ba8048f58&biw=1366&bih=595

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