Food – Prepping Prepper

If you try to maintain a healthy diet you’ve probably noticed that it’s very difficult to find acceptable food options while traveling. Airports are notorious for having not only a lack of good food, but for having an abundance of very tempting bad food. Highways are nutritional wastelands, as are most hotels and hotel breakfast buffets. In addition to high fat, sugar, salt and calorie contents, you have no control over additives and preservatives. Even if you find healthier options, you have no control over how ingredients were sourced. Besides that, hotel and airport meals can cost double or triple what normal meals and snacks cost elsewhere. Owning your own freeze dryer allows you to create healthy, portable meals for travel so you can stick to your standards no matter where you are in the world. Freeze drying removes 98% of the water from food so meals are space saving and extremely stable without refrigeration. Re-hydrating meals is easy – hot or warm water is best but you can easily rehydrate with room-temperature water if necessary. Freeze dried meals will pass through airport security and are not affected by scanning technologies. Here are some of our favorite freeze dried travel snacks: Sweet & Spicy Banana Chips – These chips satisfy our salty / sweet cravings but keep us away from high-fat airport snacks. Just freeze dry thinly sliced bananas with olive oil and add a dash of sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Spicy Chickpeas – Chickpeas are packed with protein and fiber – two things that can be difficult to come by on the road. To make this addictive snack, combine drained and rinsed chickpeas with olive oil, paprika, salt and garlic powder before freeze drying. Apple, Orange and Onion Mix – If you haven’t tried this odd combination, you’re in for a surprise. Before freeze drying, we recommend testing the ratio of apples, oranges and onions that you prefer. When you’re ready, slice apples, oranges and sweet onions into 1/2 cubes and mix together before freeze drying. Chili – Freeze dry your favorite chili (or soup) recipe for an instant comfort-food meal. If you’re feeling like a treat, pick up a bag of corn chips at the news stand to top your chili. Maple Apple Chips – We like these for breakfast with freeze dried yogurt cubes. Combine thin apple slices with a pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil and maple syrup. Yogurt Cubes – Haven’t tried freeze dried yogurt? It’s amazing. You can make your own version that is lower in sugar and has no preservatives – our favorite way to eat. Freeze dry yogurt by pouring it into an even layer on the pan. When it’s done, cut into one-inch cubes or two inch strips. Questions & Answers Q: Tell me more about the differences between regular dried jerky and freeze-dried meat. Can one make freeze-dried meat – and then how does it eat compared to dried jerky? A: With regular jerky, it, obviously, goes through a process that combines drying and curing to become jerky, sometimes involving additional heat. This process either reduces the food quality of the jerky, through the heating, and/or adds salt and other preservatives to the meat. With freeze dried meat, the only change to the meat, essentially, is that all of the water is removed from it. If the meat is cooked before going into the freeze dryer it 1) retains all of its nutritional value that it had before being freeze dried, 2) can store for up to 25 years without salt or preservatives, and 3) can be eaten in its freeze-dried form without the need to reconstitute it (add water), if you choose. Many freeze dryer owners tell us that freeze dried meat is especially good to eat in its freeze dried form. Compared to jerky, is it light, soft, and melts in the mouth.