Quick Post: Interesting Freeze Dry Experience
We’re big bread eaters in my family. A few years back, I freeze dried some tortilla’s (March 2019) to try to put something vaguely bread-like into our storage. They were normal, from Kroger, nothing weird about them. My primary question was whether something with so little water content to begin with would come out well in the freeze dryer. They are a difficult food to store because you need a big bag to store them in (I ended up using a 12″x17″x6″ bag, which held maybe 8 tortilla’s due to the way they bend, and most ended up broken.)
So I did maybe 2 trays and ended up with 2 Mylar bags of tortillas. I found them early last year, sometime at the end of Winter or start of spring, and I opened up a bag. They were 5 years old or so at the time. They were crispy, tasty, and certainly did well in the freeze dryer. So, when all is said and done, this was a successful experiment.
Now this is where it gets interesting. Those open (still in ziplock) tortillas have been sitting in a warehouse since last year when I opened them. I’ve been cleaning out the warehouse as we prepare to move, and I found them. My assumption was to throw them out, because certainly they must be bad after spending all summer, fall and winter just on a table.
However, after all this time, they were still perfect.
Ok, not a that great of a story, but it goes against what my gut thought. In general, tortilla’s go bad in weeks, so to have them last 6 years, 1 of those years with no oxygen absorption or moisture control, makes me consider looking at adding them to my storage, no matter how bulky they are. While they would break trying to use them for actual cooking, they taste good right out of the bag, and would be good with soup or stew.
A second thought I had about them was I wonder if I could just dehydrate them instead of freeze drying them. It might only take a few hours to do a load. I just moved my dehydrator into my food storage area, so I am going to give that a try also!
