Freeze Dried/Dehydrated Foods Reviews

Next Up: Dehydrated - Instant Skim Milk Powder

From: Safeway
Sealed Shelf Life: 2 Years
Opened Shelf Life: Unknown

This product has an expiry date of Aug 2012 so is eight months from expiry at time of opening.

This was my first experience with powdered milk. I have a couple #10 cans of powdered Milk and rather then open one of them up I decided to try a bag of Safeway powdered milk just to see if this stuff was any good.

The directions called for 100 grams of of powdered milk to be mixed with one Litre of cold water. Without a scale I opted to make a rough call of one cup of Powdered Milk to one litre of cold water. I found a 2.5 litre jug and mixed appoximately 2.5 - 2.75 cups of powdered milk to 2.5 litres of cold water, shook it up and put it in the fridge one hour.

After giving it an hour to cool a bit more in the fridge I grabbed a glass and gave it a shot. It wasn't bad I was expecting a chalky water kind of taste but it was almost like cool glass of regular 2% milk. Granted I didn't mix it exactly to the instructions, but over all it wasn't all that bad.

Would I buy it again? Definitely.

The trick with powdered milk is to serve it well mixed, fully dissolved and very cold!
I still have nightmares from childhood of the lumpy concoctions my mom would try to pass off as milk...lol
I kept some in my pantry when I lived on the prairies, liked it for baking as well. I haven't bought any recently... they are charging an arm and a leg for it out here these days and I am hoping to catch a really good sale for a couple of large bulk bag.

Thanks for all those reviews. I have quite a bit of Thrive freeze dried stuff, mostly the fruit and vegetables not the prepared entrees. I'm a passable cook and think I can do it better. They're too heavy on the starches and not nearly enough veggies.
Couldn't get any meat at the time though, only TVP. I did get a couple of cans but .... it's not the same, reminds me I need to get on that.

I did make some of my own dried meat, not jerky but Biltong. South African dried beef.
Rehydrates well and stupid easy, great for a beginner.
I cooked some I made 6 months ago a few days back but I'm sure it would last years. It's just too good to hang around too long. You can only use red meat for biltong. Pork and poultry need high temps(cooking or pressure canning) to kill certain parasites.
Search youtube for vids but this is the basic procedure.
Take your beef, cut into 1 inch x 1 inch and long strips with the grain. Important to cut with the grain so the strips don't rip when hung up after vinegar tenderizing. Length depends on where you'll store them. If glass jars, make the strips no longer than the jar.
Coat with coarse salt, refrigerate overnight. Don't use table salt, your biltong will be too salty.
Remove and wash in a bath of apple cider vinegar.
Coat thickly with pepper and coarse crushed coriander seed(anything else you like- cumin, chili).

Hang on wire hooks(paperclips) without touching each other on a line with a fan blowing for a few days(indoors or protect from bugs) or a week if humid. It might drip for the first day, lay down some newspaper.
Leave hanging for a couple of weeks till dry and hard. Store in airtight container.

If I had to review it, I'd say an 8 of 10.
Thin sliced you can pop it in your mouth and gnaw away, makes a nice addition of spices and flavour to many dishes when you cook in some juice.

Just wanted to bump this thread back up in case anyone had any reviews of their own to add.

I don't have a review, but I do have a question.

There are a number of sources on-line that promote meals in jars and they are dry-pack canned.
You take all your dehydrated or freeze dried ingredients for a meal, put them in a canning jar, add an oxygen absorber and seal with the lid and the ring. When opened, you add water and cook. Sometimes the rice is in a separate bag in the jar.

I love the idea for "instant" meals but there is a significant cost for the ingredients and I can see the cost doubling to buy cans for this and then cans for storage. 😛

Has anyone tried this and how was it?

This might be handy once you start opening large (#10) cans and start cooking with the stuff but I can't see spending time doing all this.
I save all the glass jars we get, tomato sauce, pickles, honey .. they reseal fine for the most part. Proper canning jars with Tattler lids should last a long time with multiple uses.
There are so many people selling survival food these days they're coming up with all kinds of inventive ways to part you from your money.

I do have a couple of reviews. I bought some packages of Mountain House eggs with ham and peppers for when I go to the cottage.
Passable but a little rubbery. Pretty short on taste but they would be better than cooking eggs in the bush.
I much prefer the dehydrated eggs you mix with water and then cook. Then you can add onions and salsa(or at least tomatoes and Frank's) and make a real meal.

Sweet and Sour Pork with rice
OK taste but devoid of any vegetables of any kind.
Next time I would add a mess of cooked kale or collards or any pot herb(dandelion, lambs lettuce, miners lettuce) , they would go well with the too sweet mix.

The object of the meals is to get your food storage in rotation and getting your family used to eating it. The costs are significant though and that is why I had to ask.

Thanks.

In the past, I've had smaller containers of products such as this http://www.providencesupplies.com/Products.php?view=productListPage&category=35

Its all vegetarian, but with an added squirrel, sparrow, or fresh trout, a guy can keep going for a while with some variety at dinner time. In my mind , it would be more of a bug-out product than anything else.

I have not tried this one in particular, but I did toss out an email to find out how much to ship from Ontario to Edmonton.

Has anyone had experience with this product?

Sparrow? 😯

In the past, I've had smaller containers of products such as this http://www.providencesupplies.com/Products.php?view=productListPage&category=35

Its all vegetarian, but with an added squirrel, sparrow, or fresh trout, a guy can keep going for a while with some variety at dinner time. In my mind , it would be more of a bug-out product than anything else.

I have not tried this one in particular, but I did toss out an email to find out how much to ship from Ontario to Edmonton.

Has anyone had experience with this product?

My Review in this thread of the Chessy Broccoli Rice came from a Food for Health Bucket.

Great Product, well worth the money.

But if your in Edmonton, I would recommend you buy from http://www.bridensolutions.ca/ They are in Cochrane, AB (close to home for you) and the owner actually posts on this forum from time to time.

Great Little Company, I've spent quite a bit of money with them and all well worth it.

I buy Thrive from Shelf Reliance. Cheaper then buying retail and I buy a lot from costco also. Mainly the stuff i can get cheaper then thrive, like flour and rice. The rice from shelf reliance is very good but i think i just like the jasmine rice 😉 We also garden and hunt our own food then i do a lot of canning and we're looking into dehydrating this year too.
http://canada.shelfreliance.com/foreverthrive

I just placed another order for some new Freeze Dried product.

Just want to bump this thread back up for new reviews 🙂

My wife and I stock Go Food, which is dehydrated meals, etc.. We've tried a number of the meals, and they're very good. My parents buy Go Food for every day eating and really enjoy it. All of their food has at least a 15 year shelf life. The more of it we have, the less we worry about storing shorter shelf life foods. For us, we prefer storing meals instead of ingredients for meals. I have a monthly automatic order set up that comes in. I ended up going with Go Food as a wholesale buyer. Every month I get a bit of money back in the form of a deposit into a Paypal account from them. It looks like the deposits will add up to around a month and a half of food for free each year. That's pretty good. If you are interested, here's the link:
http://ontario.mygofoods.com/

Which of these companies are Canadian?

I am only doing business with Canadian Companies wherever possible.
Keep Jobs in Canada folks

I don't know of any Canadian manufacturers, but there are a few Canadian distributors around. My money goes to Briden Solutions. The owners are preppers and they support the forum by pointing their clients to the website. Although the products come from Utah, it's about the closest thing we have to an actual Canadian supplier. There are a couple others, but Briden is the only one I know of that reaches out to the prepper community not only to sell goods, but actually get involved in support and education.

I think maybe Bauly Specialty Foods in Oakville has gone away. I've been trying to contact them for weeks, phone and mail. No reply
One I've bought from in the past was Harvest Foodworks in Ont. Most of theirs I think is dehydrated not FD. That makes your shelf life 2-5 years instead of 25 years. The stuff was about equal to most dehydrated food. Heavy on starch and almost no veggies. Damn poor excuse for nutrition.

This is the problem I see with all the ready entrees. They're just starch and flavored sauce. Then they charge you $10 for something you could make for $2. A steady diet of this will kill you unless you're adding an equal amount of fresh produce to the package.

OK, rant over, it's safe to come out.