Dehydrated is much cheaper and lasts about as long. In fact it's cheaper than canned foods from the store. I have been using it in my every day meals for more than a decade and I save considerably on my food bill.
Freeze dried entrees are great for short term emergencies and as light weight backpacking foods. But it's very expensive, has high sodium, and generally not real healthy to eat long term. Not to mention it gets old eating it day after day. I know, I ate my way through a year supply once. I thought I would die before I finished it.
What I've found to be a good solution is to store individual ingredients rather than prepared entrees. You get a lot more variety that way. For example, spaghetti and meat sauce will always be nothing more than spaghetti and meat sauce. Yet if you had stored pasta, tomato, meat and spices, you could have turned them into a bunch of different foods, especially when you factor in all the other ingredients you can store too.
The food storage mantra has always been "store what you eat, and eat what you store". There's good reason behind that. First off, it makes no sense to store foods you wouldn't eat unless you had no other choice. That's the worst time to be forced to eat things you don't like.
Secondly it lets you incorporate those foods into your regular diet. This lets your body get used to them. A sudden change in diet, especially during times of stress, can really throw your digestive system out of whack, at a time that you really can't afford it. Cooking with the foods also allows you time to get familiar with them and learn to make really good tasting foods that your family will enjoy.
Third, it lets you rotate your foods, so nothing is just sitting back and getting old for no reason. This is why it's good to also incorporate foods into your food storage that you eat regularly such as canned goods, dry package mixes from the store, beans, rice, etc.
Dehydrated is also a technology that we can do ourselves. It's simple to dry and store your own foods. And if you're already used to cooking with them, it makes it easy to use your home dried foods in your every day meals.
just curious what you are using as your dehydrator? I have an electric one but have seen some pretty cool designs for solar units. I decided to take on the solar oven project so might as well build a solar dehydrator while I'm at it.
Actually, freeze-dried generally has a significantly longer shelf life than dehydrated. It also maintains more of the nutrients than dehydration does. A big problem that a lot of people have in their food storage is that they don't realize that since a food has a shelf life of 20 years, that doesn't necessarily mean all of its nutrients will last for 20 years. Some vitamins and minerals simply don't last that long. So if S ever HTF, a lot of people may be eating a lot of empty calories . . . which is a lot better than nothing, but your chances of getting sick will be much higher without other nutrients as well. Freeze drying will maintain the nutrients for longer than dehydration does. The dehydration process itself gets rid of many of the nutrients.
The type of freeze-dried food that I think MikeK is talking about is the Mountain House type freeze-dried already prepared meals. If you're thinking of buying a bunch of freeze dried foods and then cooking them yourself, and even working them into your main diet, like companies like THRIVE (Shelf Reliance) encourage you to do, you'll be better off. Like what MikeK says about storing individual ingredients instead of pre-packaged meals.
I would buy freeze-dried mostly over dehydrated. Especially with fruit. Freeze dried fruit is at least 10 times better than dehydrated. I could eat THRIVE's freeze dried pineapple all day like it was candy.
The initial lifespan estimate on dehydrated food were made many years ago and were deliberately on the conservative side because they didn't know for sure. Walton Feed's website lists some examples of foods stored for about 30 years and what condition they were in when opened. Remember, that these foods were stored with older technologies like nitrogen flushing, which aren't as effective as the more modern O2 absorbers. Food packed today will last even longer. And they are beginning to redo the storage life estimates to reflect the new data on longer lifespans.
My own experience with this is with foods stored in a hot metal shed in the texas heat for over 10 years. They've held up remarkably well and the only thing I threw out was a can of biscuit mix that the baking powder had offgassed in.
Some of the freeze dried foods are far better in quality. I love any form of freeze dried berries. But I consider them a luxury treat more than a staple. Another good example is sweet corn. Dehydrated sweet corn never really rehydrates well, while freeze dried is pretty close to fresh. But there are a lot of ingredients where they are so close that the extra expense for freeze dried isn't worth it. That is if you actually rotate the foods.
If you plan on just putting it aside for several decades, then freeze dried might be a better choice, but not rotating it into the diet is a bad idea for many reasons. "Store what you eat, and eat what you store" just makes a lot more sense. The downside to FD foods is that the expense makes people hesitant to use them in their daily meals.
Personally, I have some of the FD entrees for camping and times when I won't have time to cook or don't want any smells getting out. I also have a few of the individual ingredients as snacks.
But I've been through year supplies (and more) of both types, and from that experience, dehydrated came out ahead for a multitude of reasons, at least for me. Storage is just one of them. Dehydrated foods shrink as they dry, meaning they take up considerably less space to store the equivelant amount.
It depends on the fruit or veggie and how much water in contains. Anywhere from a couple hours to overnight in some cases. You can also dry meats and fish that way too. A dehydrator is really handy to have. Check the gardening forum for tons of dehydration posts.
Neither the freeze drying nor the dehydrating process adds any sodium. But many of the freeze dried meals, like the Mountain House backpacking ones, are high in sodium. These meals are good for camping/backpacking, but I wouldn't recommend eating them every day.
How is the quality and taste of the meats? Is one better tasting than the other? I'd like to get some freeze dried meat, but I hesitate because I literally can't eat fatty meat. It just grosses me out and I lose my appetite. I'd hate to spend the money and then find out I can't use it.
Since fat doesn't store well without going rancid, they go out of their way to trim the meats down very lean. So freeze dried meat isn't fatty, just very expensive. As for taste, they've very good.
It really depends a lot on what your doing and if you have the gear.
We can some stuff, we jerk some, we salt some, we dry some stuff, we freeze some and we freeze-dry some.
It really just depends on what you like.
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