[Music] I've got an exciting video today I am freeze drying a huge load of Alaskan salmon I have freest dried other meats before but I have not freeze dried any fish and it is an interesting story of how I came into possession of all of this wild caught Alaskan salmon let me tell you I'll first say that the people here in Alaska are so nice and so giving with all their amazing stuff that they hunt and fish for they love sharing it with their neighbors at least people who we've been around which has been awesome but I had a friend who had a bunch of leftover salmon from last Summer's catch they were trying to make room in their freezer for fishing this summer wanted to get rid of all of their extra fish I gladly volunteered to take their leftover salmon it's still good it's not as great as if it was brand new fresh it but it's been vacuum sealed in freezer for a few months well almost a year but I was like me me I will take your fish and I just knew I wanted to freeze dry it and that will give me some awesome long-term storage of healthy delicious amazing Alaskan salmon and I am so stoked for that so today I am showing you how to freeze dry fish from start to finish including packaging and we're going to re reheat not reheat we're going to reconstitute the fish at the end and cook it up and do a little taste test so let's get started hello welcome to my kitchen I am about to head out the door but wanted to get all of our salmon prepped and ready to go into the freeze dryer so just wanted to show you how I'm going to get all this prepared I am going to be pre-freezing our salmon on our freeze dryer trays before freeze drying them I'm just hoping that will give us a quicker run in our freeze dryer by doing that so let me show you what I'm going to use and how I'm going to set everything up here is all of the beautiful salmon that was gifted to us I am super stoked about this this is the perfect opportunity to freeze dry some fish I have not done this before and I'm super excited to have this turned into shelf stable long-term Pantry Shelf item that I can go to whenever I need so here we go I just had a little friend come by and he wants to show his plant that he's growing it's some type of flower seeds right yeah there's a Zenia but I don't know the others they made those at a little craft day at our gym so cute I have another one that we planted in the garden it's a Zenia yeah and this is the bottom super cool my plan is to take the fish out of the bag slice it up into just like serving portions get it on our freeze shying tray once it's filled put my snapon lid on top of the tray and then I'll be able to stack them up in my freezer for the pre freezing Stu if you I'm using my silicone tray liners if you're interested in these I will link them in the video description below I just got them on Amazon if you are interested in um tray Lids these are from Harvest Right From The Harvest Right website and I've got a link in the video description below also where you can shop for all the Harvest Right accessories and freeze dryers if you are looking for any of that if you aren't sure how to go to the video description when you are looking at the video it'll have it'll show the first few sentences of my description and there's a little um link that says show more you click that and that will bring you to the full description that will show you the links just in case you didn't know it's going to take some time to open up all this fish so I will just do some time lapses so it'll go by much quicker okay I am all finished I did the last two trays off camera just because I don't think you care to see all of that I was able to fit most of the salmon on my trays I've got four fillets left over I think on here I have about eight or so I don't know exactly but I was able to load these up hopefully they all turn out great I'm going to find a use for these guys I'm thinking of trying to do some smoke salmon we tried before and it did not turn out good so I need to find a better recipe and try smoking those last four fillets and if we get it right it could be delicious so now these are ready to go into my freezer I just want to get them pre- Frozen and then they will be ready to go into the freeze dryer and with these Lids they're so convenient because you can just stack them up carry them down to your fridge or freezer wherever in one nice easy go so definitely recommend the try Lids from Harvest Right and surprisingly my medium-sized freeze dryer can hold a lot of food this is a lot of salmon if I had the large I am sure I would have been able to fit all of these fillets but I still got a lot on my trays so feeling good about that and those trays fit right in in my freezer this is our bonus fridge freezer that we have in our basement but stacked up like that they fit nicely I can shut the door and we are good to go once these are frozen we will get them into the freeze dryer and I will show you the settings that I'm going to use on that once it's done I'm going to show you how to package up the salmon and I'm going to cook up rehydrate and cook up one of the fillets also just so we can make sure it still tastes delicious even free dried but sure it's going to catch you guys later welcome back it is the next day we are ready to get our salmon trays into the freeze dryer I have my salmon here I've already started my freeze dryer getting that cooling I'm just going to take the lids off of my salmon trays and I'll show you how they're looking now that they're frozen okay let's get our freeze dryer all set up and ready to go we are going to come in to customize I like to just hit reset to show you this is the standard setting on your freeze dryer which I'm good with all these settings I just like to increase this dry time to like 6 or 7 hours and I do that just in case it happens to finish like in the middle of the night it'll keep drying instead of stopping the drying process and I can't come and get it out of the freeze dryer right away so this just ensures that it'll just keep drying in the night night and then I'll be able to get it out in the morning I am going to hit save and start and then we're going to wait a 15minute cooling period here is all of our beautiful salmon ready to go in the freeze dryer some of them are kind of tall I'm a little worried on if they're going to fit properly on the shelves but we will see when we get there you just don't want anything like touching the top of the little tray cuz that's where the heating element is so we will see let's get these loaded up once our 15 minutes is complete here we go our freeze dryer is ready if you can see the screen there we go we got to close the drain valve don't forget that step let's get these in one two three and four we are just going to lock up the door so now we're just going to hit continue and it's freezing super excited to see how this turns out I assume it is going to to take a while so I will check back with you guys when this is done I will let you know exactly how long it took to freeze dry and then we will package it up and rehydrate and cook hello it is the next day our salmon has entered its extra dry cycle the hours that it has been um drying is 33 hours so what I want to do is test to see if this salmon is fully freeze dried one of my awesome viewers gave me a tip on how I can test to see if your food is actually fully freeze dry what I'm going to do is take a tray out weigh it on a food scale put the tray back in the freeze dryer let it run for about another hour or so take it out reway it if the weight stays the same then you know it is not still pulling moisture out of the food and your food is fully done if you're weight is changing then you still need more time in the freeze dryer so briia what do you say we give this a try sure I've not done this before so cut let's see okay to pause my freeze dryer I'm going to just hit this little guy here and open my drain valve so I can open this door bada bing bada boom okay Bri go ahead and open the door let's pull out that top tray oh it's hot it's just warm oh it's hot it's not hot it's warm it's hot sh okay sumon push power to my scale okay let's set this on the scale okay what's the number say 9 66 yay okay memorize that number okay no I can't I have a small mind oh boy okay 96 66 G is the weight that we are at so I am just going to put this back into my dryer close the door and lock her up and then I'm going to select more dry time please close drain valve thank you very much continue and it says 2 hours we're just going to let it go for about an hour and do a reway and see if there's any change this is kind of exciting don't you think uhhuh all right I'll check in with you guys in an hour and we will reway this fish okay I'm back at my freeze dryer it has been over an hour and we are going to do the we test now so again we're just going to come here we're going to open the drain valve so I am now just taking out this top rack again cuz that is the one that I weighed place it on my [Music] scale 96 7 it's a gam heavier okay I set it on here again and now we're at 964 which that makes me think that it is still removing moisture from this fish I don't know how precise you're supposed to be when doing this but I want to be super accurate with this salmon cuz I definitely don't want it to go bad since it's kind of late at night I am contemplating just letting it run through the night again just to be super sure that this is nice and dry so that I can have it preserved properly I think the consensus is that I'm going to let this go overnight check in the morning check our weight and Hope that we are good to go from there so let's keep going this is a long freeze dryer run I thought it would be cuz this is some thick fish and I just want to make sure the centers of those fillets are nice and dry and that we don't have any lingering moisture in there I just want to be super careful with these cuz this is some good stuff in here I'll check back with you guys in the morning with an update yet again it's another wonderful day let's give the pleas guys another weight test our weight is at 960 so I'm going to let this go for its last hour do another weight check I'm hoping we are going to be good to go because we're at 46 hours I don't think I'm going to wait any longer than that we should be good and I will keep you updated I am back and ready to do our final fish W okay we are in luck the fish did not change in weight it was still at the 960 G so we are good to go here is how the fish looks I want to hurry and get this packaged up because once it's exposed to oxygen it can start rehydrating your food but it just feels light feels kind of Styrofoam texture but I'm super stoked about this let's get this packaged up what I'm going to use to package my fish are my Harvest Right myar bags and oxygen absorbers and then I'm going to heat seal it with my heat sealer over here that is going to give us the longest shelf life for this fish I'm going to set a piece aside for me to cook up really quick and do a little taste test of the freeze-dried salmon I'll do a little time lapse of me doing all the packaging and meet you up in the kitchen to do the [Music] rehydrating okay wow I was able to get six bags of salmon in my Myer bags you can tell that your oxygen absorbers are working because after some time these do kind of drink up as the absorbers um absorb the oxygen that is left in these bags after you seal them so that's one way to tell that your Myer bags and oxygen absorbers are working properly if they don't do that then you might want to figure out something else one of these days I would like to invest in one of those vacuum chamber sealers that take out all of the air out of your bags they work way better than like a food saver that's what I currently have is the food saver and it serves his purpose but I would love to get one of those chamber fancy vacuum sealers one of these days I'm going to get one of those but for now this is what we're doing it works perfectly fine and this is super awesome I'm very excited about all of this salmon I have a few pieces left to go rehydrate and cook so I will take you upstairs next and we will give it a taste test hello from my kitchen I am ready to cook up this salmon here it has been soaking in water for about 10 minutes okay turn over little guy okay I will just have to use my hands uh it still feels a little hard in the middle so I think it needs a little bit more time in the water all right I'm tired of waiting so let's get this show on the road I'm just going to pan fry these put a little bit of seasoning on and cook it up do a little taste test so I will meet you back when these are finished all right this is actually looking super good so let's give it a little taste test bite no come on delish it tastes great one caveat it needed more time rehydrating so keep that in mind the 15 minutes that I had it underwater was not quite enough but it still tastes great I think if I had fully rehydrated it it would be perfect and I just threw this on the pan that's not normally how I would cook salmon but it was so good I like to just oven bake it usually or smoke it on the trigger there's my salmon test I do think this would be very good just need to soak it in the water longer but besides that the parts that are fresh taste great taste like normal fresh salmon and we love it I like to end my videos out here in the beautiful Alaskan nature it's been so pretty lately we've kind of had a crappy summer so far weatherwise but the last couple days it has cleared up a bit and look we even see some blue sky so that's exciting I just love this mountain behind our house we've had some doll sheep and mountain goats up there but I think they have moved on I guess there was a baby that I missed and didn't get to see but fun perks about living in Alaska I hope you enjoyed today's video thank you so much for watching hit that subscribe button if you haven't already subscrib subscribed to this channel you see all the fun things that I am freeze in and a little bit of some of Alaska's Beauty I will catch you guys on the next video see you later