# Home made trail food...



## mosquitomountainman (Jan 25, 2010)

My wife is preparing for an 1800 mile bicycle trip next month. She's been busy dehydrating food and packaging freeze dried food from our storage supplies. This is an experpt from her online blog.









I've (Susan) been dehydrating food to take along on the bike trip. I shredded potatoes (homegrown, from our root cellar!), parboiled them, and ran them through our dehydrator. They came out great! I also cooked up some black beans and ran them through the dehydrator. I chopped up apples and dried them, plus I dehydrated bags of frozen mixed vegetables, corn, and a peas & carrot mix. I have tomatoes, strawberries, huckleberries, onion, and both sweet and hot peppers that I dried last Fall. Then I bagged up some oatmeal (premixed with cinnamon, a little sugar, and powdered milk), freeze-dried beef stew, dry butter and dry cheese. Probably a couple other things in there too that I forgot to mention. Oh yeah! The eggs! I made dehydrated eggs! I whipped them as though I was going to make omelettes, spread it out on fruit-leather trays that came with the dehydrator and dried them. They're like cornflakes when they break apart. I ran it through the blender and "ta da!", I have powdered egg! Should be some good eating on the bike trip!


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## UncleJoe (Jan 11, 2009)

Home made powdered eggs; excellent!!
With the chickens starting to mass produce, I see another project coming on. As if I don't have enough projects already.


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## mtnmom (Sep 8, 2009)

I like the eggs idea too for hiking this summer... so would you just add water then and fry?


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## mosquitomountainman (Jan 25, 2010)

mtnmom said:


> I like the eggs idea too for hiking this summer... so would you just add water then and fry?


(I'm the wife of mosquitomountainman) After you add water (ratio 1:1) to the dried eggs stir them as you would for making scrambled eggs or omelettes. Then just fry them how you would fresh eggs. You can use your dried eggs in baking too. One and a half teaspoons of dried egg equals about one fresh egg. I add the dried egg to the dry ingredients and then add the water with the wet ingredients. You can premix the egg and water if you'd rather. Just seems like an extra step to me. Some people think the 145 degree temperature duriing dehydrating is enough to kill salmonella, but there's no guarantee, so treat the dry eggs as fresh eggs. If you're not using a dehydrator with a temperature control, be extra cautious using the finished product. Eggs have enough fat in them to make it important to keep them in a dark, cool place in an airtight container. Glass containers are best.


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## *Andi (Nov 8, 2009)

Thanks for posting  

A 1800 mile bicycle trip ... WOW ... sounds like, one heck of a trip. Hope you guys have a great time.:2thumb:


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## ditzyjan56 (Oct 3, 2009)

WOW never thought to dry eggs I always froze the extras. Thanks for the great tip.


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## Homestead Gal (Nov 25, 2008)

Love the dehydrated egg idea! We just recently acquired a used food dehydrator that has a temp. control. I wanted to include eggs in our home made emergency rations and didn't know how to do it. Now I do! I'm gonna try this the next time I use the dehydrator. Hat's off to you for posting this!


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## UncleJoe (Jan 11, 2009)

Susan, In your experience, about how long does it take to dry the eggs. I started 4 tray's this morning. Thanks.


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## mosquitomountainman (Jan 25, 2010)

UncleJoe said:


> Susan, In your experience, about how long does it take to dry the eggs. I started 4 tray's this morning. Thanks.


She's on the train right now. Hopefully when she gets online again she'll have an answer.


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## UncleJoe (Jan 11, 2009)

OK. Thanks.


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## gypsysue (Mar 27, 2010)

Hey, uncle joe, this is susan. It took my eggs 3 to 4 hours to dry. The first time I put about 6 eggs on a fruit leather tray and it was a bit thick, it took longer to dry. Next time I used 4 eggs per tray and it worked better. After a couple hours I used a fork to kind of break it into sections and I turned the pieces over to help it dry faster. It was wet and kind of oily-feeling underneath. Then about an hour later I kind of stirred them around again and turned them. Next time I checked them they were all dry. I dumped all the pieces into a cake pan and let them sit in the oven (propane, so there's a pilot flame keeping the oven kind of warm) overnight just to make sure as they sat there in their jumble, that they were really all dry. 
Next day I put them in the blender, about half a cup at a time, and made them into powder. That's not a necessary step, I was just seeing how it worked, and thought powder would be less likely to puncture a ziplock bag than "pieces", since I was using a ziplock bag to take the dry eggs on my bike trip. If I were storing them for home use I'd put them in glass jars in our root cellar (dark and cool) or vaccuum seal them. If I left them in "chips" I'd probably double-bag them, though the "egg chips" aren't hard, they're kind of brittle but soft, if that makes sense.


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## UncleJoe (Jan 11, 2009)

Thanks Susan, I whipped about 3.5 dozen yesterday morning, put them on the trays and dried them at 145. At about 10 hrs. they were nice and crispy. I turned the temp back to 105 for a couple more hrs. just to be sure. Then they went into a qt. jar. Once I fill it I'll vacuum seal it. 
Thanks again for such a great idea.


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## sailaway (Mar 12, 2009)

I will have to try eggs also, may go great on a minimalist scouting outing. Do tell us how long to dry them.


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