*Freeze Dried Potato Salad*
A few months ago, I wrote a two part article on Freeze Dried Foods. Part 1 discussed the history and basics of freeze dried foods and Part 2 discussed types of foods available and vendors. Several vendors offer 'entrees' that actually provide a meal in a can. While entrees are great and fast, I wanted to use Freeze Dried Ingredients to make an actual dish. This article could be considered as Part 3 of my freeze dried food article series.
I love potato salad! So, I wanted to see if I could make this dish from (mostly) freeze dried ingredients and enjoy the resulting dish. I understand that using freeze dried ingredients will not produce the exact results as using ingredients fresh from the super market. But, my goal was to get as close to my normal recipe for potato salad as possible with the resulting taste almost as good.
For the ingredients, I used potato dices, whole eggs and onions. The picture above shows potato slices but I decided to use potato dices to keep the look and texture of normal potato salad. Following my normal recipe for potato salad, I measured appropriate quantities of ingredients and prepared them following the preparation instructions on the cans.
The powdered whole-eggs were tricky as there is no way possible to reconstitute the eggs to a boiled egg texture and taste. Basically, I scrambled the eggs and threw them in. I also used a few jar ingredients such as relish, Italian dressing and of course, mayonnaise.
When I was done, I was really pleased with the looks as seen in the picture above. But, compared to my normal potato salad…the outcome was not real good! The taste was bland basically tasting like potatoes and mayonnaise. I couldn't even tell that eggs were in the salad!
Another problem was that potato dices from Mountain House were not what I expected. To me, dices means cubes. These potatoes were small chunks.
I was not pleased with the results. However, to salvage this project, I decided to add freeze dried ham dices. It made a big difference in the taste and I actually enjoyed eating it.
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