Freeze drying Vs. Dehydrating Vs. Traditional canning

[Buggyout]

As I transition to a new place, I'm trying to figure out what my long term food "staples" will be. Fresh meat and gardens will get a person a long way, we plan on relying on that kind of resource. It's good to have a backup plan, of course. I've had experience with canning and dehydrating. They are great methods to preserve food. However, one of the few things I'm looking at is a HarvestRight freeze Dryer. If you spend a few minutes looking at YouTube videos, you'll get blown away. Most of the food processed has a 20+ year shelf life.

Most of your emergency supply foods are freeze dried and cost an arm and a leg. Now, the freeze dryer aint cheap either, however, in the long run it looks like it pays for itself.

Anyone have a unit like this? or experience?

Love to hear from ya!

-Buggy

[dalewick]

I've used one but unfortunately can't afford one. They are AWESOME!!! If water isn't an issue, I prefer freeze dried to dehydrated or canned. I't easy to make entire meals with one. We did our meat, then vegetables of different varieties and could mix up a variety of soups, stews and stir fries by just altering the spices and additives. Even easier was just Freeze drying our left overs and packaging them as meals. The were great for camping and hunting.

If Harvest Right would care to loan me a unit I will continue to sing there praises.

Seriously, they are very nice.

Dale

[Nik]

Interesting...
A combo mini-freezer, vac-oven and mini vac-pump ??
Couple of 'WTF' concerns:
Power supply ? How much draw, how fussy ??
Is 'clever', so risk of 'natural' screen degradation over several years. What of line-glitches due local lightning strikes ? EMP ??
Serviceability ? Will you need a bespoke set of seals etc and a 'coolant' top-up in 4~~5 years ??

I'm not saying 'Bad Idea', I'm just concerned you'll lose the use...

---
My 'String' tale is still stymied because I cannot yet find a practicable way to preserve the narrator's neighbours' slowly-thawing freezer contents.

Seems you cannot get 'pickling salt' in UK beyond trivial quantities, as the small but essential nitrite/nitrate content may be leached for use in EODs.
Yeah, right.
Without a really big drum of dry-salting salt or a zillion Mason jars, plot coming around to 'Home Smoking'. Easy enough for a few cuts, but the logistics for a lot is non-trivial. Especially starting from zero...

[Mangler]

Perhaps my question should be in another thread.

My question, regarding which food storage method is better, is this. How much food does one need to store and for how long? Regardless of the process used to store the food, can you really use all of it?

Reviewing history, specifically the economic breakdowns in Brazil, Argentina, Kosovo, and Syria, I see that the effects of war and economic collapse stabilize quickly or people simply leave. Why have 10 years of food on hand if normal cycles of survival are less than that?

Would being mobile be better than being well-stocked but unable to get out?

[Nik]

What you don't need to eat, you may trade. And, perhaps, such foodstuffs being 'vittles' will raise fewer eye-brows, spawn less gossip than if 'luxury'. A few precious cans / jars of store goods would make your dealing more convincing. Donating some makings towards eg a festive meal or wedding dinner, or contributing if mishap destroys a neighbour's stores, would earn much good-will.

Just remember that forest and scrub may burn, slopes may slump, rivers may rise and the ground may shake, several scenarios leaving you without GPS to locate where to dig in deranged landscape. IMHO, severe volcanic ash-fall is low-probability, as the Cascades etc seem quiet, but Aleutian chain and their Siberian kin are restless if not actually erupting. One season of vog, haze, crop failures etc would be bad. Murphy's Law will so bite your butt if you already have problems...

As ever, you do not want all your 'eggs' in one basket. If placed under sufficient duress by roving banditos, 'semi-official militia' or 'local authorities' bearing 'scrip', you should be able to yield a convincing cache...

[registror]

Perhaps my question should be in another thread.

My question, regarding which food storage method is better, is this. How much food does one need to store and for how long? Regardless of the process used to store the food, can you really use all of it?

Reviewing history, specifically the economic breakdowns in Brazil, Argentina, Kosovo, and Syria, I see that the effects of war and economic collapse stabilize quickly or people simply leave. Why have 10 years of food on hand if normal cycles of survival are less than that?

Would being mobile be better than being well-stocked but unable to get out?

grains store basically forever, if you add Bay leaves, seal them well, remove the oxygen before sealing and have them protected from rodents. It's the fats that go bad without freezing or salting them really heavily. Only animals in the far north have much fat and thats likely to be the only place on earth where some will survive, other than maybe some rats on small island. That's the biggest threat, people having eaten all of the animals. You'll have to grow high-fat items like soybeans, sunflowers, You can't count upon storage for more than a year. After a year of shtf, 99% of people will be dead, so I think that at that point, you'll be ok scavenging and being semi-mobile (at night, using NVD, solar-charged) Ditto having small, scattered, well hidden plots of sprouts and root-veggies. Cant use fencing, tho, since it's a dead give away, but with all of the animals dead, you wont need fencing. If any animals are left, traps should suffice to protect your crops.

I think you need to cache, in holes in the ground (scattered, hidden) enough food for a year and that's a LOT, about 1000 lbs, minimum, if you've got a proper mix of proteins, fats and carbs. You're still going to lose 30 lbs or more of your bodyweight. Doing that much caching, tho, at night, is a huge pita, so almost nobody is going to do it.

The world has never SEEN ANYTHING like a world-wide, simultaineous, complete shtf, which is what we are facing. When the US economy goes down, the world is going to follow. There will be no better place to go. Some places will have a more primitive, rural life, with non-hybrid seeds, but war, accidents and disease typically wipe out such populations when they can't get modern medical care or defend themselves and their crops, when there's no animals to help or to provide fat, eggs, milk.

[Dorobuta]

As I transition to a new place, I'm trying to figure out what my long term food "staples" will be. Fresh meat and gardens will get a person a long way, we plan on relying on that kind of resource. It's good to have a backup plan, of course. I've had experience with canning and dehydrating. They are great methods to preserve food. However, one of the few things I'm looking at is a HarvestRight freeze Dryer. If you spend a few minutes looking at YouTube videos, you'll get blown away. Most of the food processed has a 20+ year shelf life.

Most of your emergency supply foods are freeze dried and cost an arm and a leg. Now, the freeze dryer aint cheap either, however, in the long run it looks like it pays for itself.

Anyone have a unit like this? or experience?

Love to hear from ya!

-Buggy

The LDS community here loves those units. I'm considering getting one. combine with a vacuum sealer and you're good to go.

[Dorobuta]

Perhaps my question should be in another thread.

My question, regarding which food storage method is better, is this. How much food does one need to store and for how long? Regardless of the process used to store the food, can you really use all of it?

Reviewing history, specifically the economic breakdowns in Brazil, Argentina, Kosovo, and Syria, I see that the effects of war and economic collapse stabilize quickly or people simply leave. Why have 10 years of food on hand if normal cycles of survival are less than that?

Would being mobile be better than being well-stocked but unable to get out?

The good thing is, stocking up doesn't hurt you. Not stocking up can hurt you. Absolute worst case scenario, you have to leave some stuff behind. Best case, you live and eat well and have extra food to barter with. Stocking up doesn't stop you from being mobile if you need to be. Not stocking up may force you to be mobile as you will have to forage.

I'd rather have and not need it or not be able to use, than not have it and suffer. YMMV.

[RICHFL]

Canning you will can meat, vegs, dry cerals, rice, etc. They will last 5 years if placed in a cool dry dark place (think root cellar). You don't need a lot of equipment, jars, lids, water, heat, pressure cooker. Cost is less the more you do. Jars can be found in stores, on-line, even given away. You can use pint, up to gallon sizes.

menus can be planned around canned goods. My parents who lived during the 1930's did more canning then even I have done. They learned the lessons from hunger!!! My group has over 4 years worth of food s over and being used daily. When we butcher our live stock we save a lot of meat by smoking, drying then canning it.

[Tugaloo]

We grow vegetables to can or freeze. For tomato sauce, we add spices before we can them, the tomato sauce is ready to use already seasoned. We also can fish, trout, bass, bream and walleye. In a SHTF world, campfire canning will be interesting..
We vacuum seal heirloom seeds, dry beans rice etc.

The reason why we do it is simple; read the labels on canned foods. If we had labels, ours would say tomato sauce, 2021, with oregano and basil and nothing else. Plus, it tastes as we prefer it.

[Nik]

Copied from my earlier post as not found solution(s)...
---
My 'String' tale is still stymied because I cannot yet find a practicable way to preserve the narrator's neighbours' slowly-thawing freezer contents.

Seems you cannot get 'pickling salt' in UK beyond trivial quantities, as the small but essential nitrite/nitrate content may be leached for use in EODs.
Yeah, right.
Without a really big drum of dry-salting salt or a zillion Mason jars, plot coming around to 'Home Smoking'. Easy enough for a few cuts, but the logistics for a lot is non-trivial. Especially starting from zero...

[Tugaloo]

IMO and for the long, long term, available local resources are better than any other method. We have cans of Mountain House and others; that last according to them 25 years.
That being said we prefer catching fish or harvesting wild game to survive long term and supplement them with fresh harvests.

Are fresh harvests renewable?



Yup, as long as "boys and girls" survive.

I hope deer porn doesn't offend anyone.

[Buggyout]

A few months ago, I pulled the trigger on the Harvest Right freeze dryer. All I have to say is....

WOW.

I can't believe I hadn't had this in my preps up to this point. Absolutely the number one for long term food processing and storage method I have. The stuff you make has a 20 YEAR shelf life! No canning, no dehydrating is even going to come close to that. Period.

Instead of tasting like the garbage freeze dried food you can buy for astronomical prices (I'm guilty on buying that stuff), the stuff I process tastes just like how I made it when re-constituted. We did a run on chicken the other day for $20 total cost and got just under two #10 cans, big name brand sells for $100!

I did homemade spaghetti before that, I got TEN 2.5 serving mylar bags for under $10 worth of supplies. You guys know how much a Mountain House spaghetti costs? Yup, about $10! Haha!

The real savings comes from my over abundant fruits and veggies I grow. I literally had crates of peaches, blue berries and green beans this year. We canned and froze some, but freeze dried most of it. I also went out and bought a giant bag of peeled garlic (Like five pounds!) at a restaurant supply store. That was dried down and made into powder.

The cons... yup...

The price of the dang thing! It was around $2600 and more because of bags and oxygen absorbers. We have been using it pretty much non-stop, it should process enough to pay for itself by next year though.

Here are some pictures, if you guys have questions, feel free to fire 'em away!

[Tugaloo]

Buggy, I stand in awe! What a setup! It will amortize very quickly.

[Buggyout]

Sorry guys! Upon re-reading my post, it sounded like a late night TV commercial for Harvest Right! Hahah! I don't have any connection with the company, except owning the thing.

I stand by it though. Here are more pics to include my workstation. All in the bunker!