Sign into an existing account

This is one of the ones that I expected to fail but I also expected freeze dried mushrooms to not turn into mush in sealed bags since it lasts forever if you immediately grind it into a powder so there's that. Additionally, I have what I call "Breakfast in a cup" which is biscuits, gravy, eggs, hashbrowns, cheese and it works very well - just add hot water and eat. The texture isn't amazing or anything like you might expect - it's more like a mush but it's tasty and doesn't seem to go bad.

For the new people at home: about 6 years ago I got a freeze dryer. Since then I've been experimenting with it to see what can and can't be done to preserve foods long term. The big selling point of freeze dried food is that, properly done and packaged, it can last up to 25 years on the shelf.

I know people have asked me to attach photos of the food I'm working with but this is just a biscuit. It looked like a biscuit before, during, after, and now. So, no picture.

Generally speaking, breads are problematic to freeze dry. Sure, you take ALL of the water out so mold, etc. can't grow on it but rehydrating any kind of bread is annoying at best because it's just so dry and adding any kind of water tends to make it just turn into mush.

I wanted to see if biscuits could be freeze dried because a good homemade biscuit can be a boon. It can be a comfort food, it can be combined with powdered or freeze dried homemade gravy (also a powder but whatever). It's not like hard tack which tastes like crackers but you absolutely want to moisten them up because the name "hard" is absolutely what they are and there's a real chance of breaking teeth if you bite into it. Biscuits turn into rocks.

I made sure that this pack of biscuits was one of the packs that hadn't lost its seal and still had vacuum.

The idea was: Whip out a pack of biscuits, add some hot water to a batch of gravy until it was a little thin, crumble the biscuit and pour the gravy on top and let the extra water rehydrate the biscuit. That part went without a hitch. Freeze dried gravy doesn't rehydrate with the same texture so I used fresh gravy in order to eliminate variables like that and the biscuit did indeed soften and become something close to what you'd expect.

Unfortunately, biscuits are made with oil, butter, lard, etc... some kind of fat. Smarter people here already see that there's a significant chance of the fat in it going rancid. I've had mixed results with fats in foods in the past so it's definitely not a "always fail" issue. For example, gravy is made with oil and it lasts fine.

The texture of the biscuit was fine. It's not a "fresh out of the oven" texture, for sure. But it's passable in a pinch. The taste was a little bitter as you might expect when oil starts to go rancid but it wasn't terribly strong. So I ate it up and waited.

Result: FAIL.

I had liquid shit squirting out of my ass all day.

So biscuits are not something you can reliably shelve for long term storage like that.