When we had chickens, several times I freeze dried eggs. In this post, I had freeze dried 96 eggs in several cycles. That was 8 dozen eggs. In this post, it was 14 dozen. I’ve freeze dried probably more than 200 dozen eggs, mostly form when we had chickens. In this post, I wrote about rehydrated them and how we liked those. Now that I’ve done this a few times, I know that 2 tablespoons of freeze dried eggs and 2 tablespoons of water is about perfect.
We store almost all of our freeze dried foods in mason jars. Mylar bags are good too but I don’t use those often for several reasons.
- Oxygen absorbers are recommended for mylar bag food storage. That’s another expense.
- Mylar bags crush easily and freeze dried food will crumble if the bags are mashed. This is fine for eggs or potato flakes but not so good for food items that are meant to hold their shape such as peas, carrots, turkey, etc.
- Rodents can chew through mylar bags unless they’r stored in heavy duty plastic storage containers.
- For the most part, they are not reasonable.
Mylar bags are great for traveling. We rarely travel but bringing along a few mylar bags of food is great to cut down on eating out. When it’s time to serve, water can be added to the mylar bag to rehydrate the food. I often store a few mylar bags of whatever I’m putting up and pass those along to Chad for when they’re camping.
On average, 7 mil thick or thicker bags are currently run a bit less than $20 for 50 one quart size bags. 100 300 cc oxygen absorbers are about $15, so for 50 bags and 50 oxygen absorbers, the packaging cost would be about .55 per package (bag and oxygen absorber). A case of quart Ball jars here costs about $13 so that’s about $1.08 per jar. If I use them twice, that’s about the same as one bag and one oxygen absorber and I use the jars over and over and over. If I’m vacuum sealing them (vs. canning), I re-use the lids over and over so it’s way more economical for me to use the jars.
Anyway . . here are the eggs when they came out of the freeze dryer.
And here they are a bit of time in the blender.
That’s six dozen eggs all reduced down to two quarts and one pint. We don’t eat eggs every day but if we did, that would be about enough for 18 days. Of course, we don’t eat freeze dried eggs unless we are out of fresh eggs . . and I hope that doesn’t happen but we have them if we need them.