It’s very generous of you to share your inventory method. I don’t own a freeze dryer-yet, but I hope to in the future. Watching your channel and other channels with similar informative information has been a true blessing.
@@Philat4800feet I'm in Pennsylvania as well, Huntingdon County in the middle of the state. They also put really gross things in scrapple, like eyeballs. When I heard that I said, no way for this gal!
Phil, I’m still waited on my FD, but I developed an MS Access Database to track my FD batches and Food Inventory, including non-FD items. It tracks food type, amount, nutrition, location, batch, tray, wet weight, dry weight, date, source, cost, power consumption, When disposed, comments, etc. Once I’ve refined it with use a little, I would be happy to share, if anyone is interested.
ME too! :) I love spreadsheets but it takes me FOREVER to get formulas and formatting just right. I wanted to add Pie Charts and Graphs but have no clue how to do that yet either. So much to learn yet.
Thank you for this video. I was trying to figure out how I was going to keep track of all my FD items when my FDer arrives next week. I love spreadsheets so this is how I'm going to log everything. You explained it very clearly and it's exactly what I needed. Thank you again!
I love your system! One suggestion: it's possible to save all of this info in a single file using tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet. My first tab is the Master List, tab 2 is Tote 1, tab 3 is Tote 2, etc. You can rename the tabs by double-clicking on the tab name. One advantage of yours is that you can open both files side-by-side so that the cut & paste function can be seen at once. Just a matter of preference. I appreciate your methodical way of doing things. Since so much of your information is data-driven, I feel it is more trustworthy than other sources. Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us!
My method is to fill a tote of similar items. Cheese, dairy, meat and protein, fruits and veggies, snacks, and meals. Then once a tote is filled it goes to storage. Then I take from the oldest tote.
Goods questions. Serving size would be based if the food was a side dish or a component ingredient. It depends on diet and eating habits. Many of us should take the advice of our mothers and eat more vegetables. In my case the veggies were blanched. I like to pick squash while the blossom is still on and seeds aren't developed.
@@Philat4800feet Plenty of room to label the bags, If the Ship hits the sand and we have no power to run a computer, vacuum pump ,bag sealerZip lock is all we get. I hope you have a good source of fresh water and a hand pump. Today we did apples with our wall mounted French fry cutter and 500 Vit. C water.
Thank you for sharing these files and information! I have my FD on order, and this will allow me to use the inventory tracker forms from the start. Thanks again!
Does you wife put maple syrup on her scrapple? If not, she should try it. It's good on Spam, too. I am accustomed to getting looks from people about how I eat certain things. Being from New Jersey, I put ketchup on scrambled eggs, which gets some odd looks from the natives in NC where I live now. LOL Take care and God Bless.
You don't have to be from New Jersey to put ketchup on eggs...they taste better that way. My wife eats her scrapple plain, but a kid her about adding extra saw dust to it.
Love this Phil!! Thank you for sharing! Have you considered having all the totes as tabs in the one file, and using functions to auto-generate the master list?
Excellent idea! I used to do this when I was still working and it made things a lot easier. Instead of a bunch of individual documents, you have one document with all your "pages". Thanks for posting!
I was just about to say the same. Lol. Phil, I love your channel! Thank you for sharing your knowledge. I’ve been waiting on my machine for 6 weeks. Suppose to be here next week.
Great inventory control system Phil! I can't help but wonder, where are you able to store ALL of those totes? I use very similar ones, but they really do take up A LOT of space?
@Ed Heinlein - My home is under 850 sq feet so I am always trying to figure out unique storage ideas. Get rid of your coffee and end tables. Stack two containers, throw a cloth over them, wa la, you have an end table. The same can be used as bedside tables. Set two side by side, cover, you now have a coffee table. I don’t know how tall your containers are but possibly you could put risers on your beds and shove them under. I use under bed storage containers, they are long and not very deep. I can stack two on top of each other. Depending on the size of your beds think of the possibilities. Eight will fit perfectly under a twin size bed. And don’t forget closets, they often have a lot of wasted space above and below.
Excellent method! PS use Open Office for a free, better, clone, of Microsoft Excel/Word/Powerpoint - full functions of Excel, can read and write Excel documents too
What is the point of the list you put inside the tote? I've been storing my food in totes as well but haven't been keeping a list like this, I put all veggies in one tote and meat in another etc. I like your idea and think it would organize me.
Hi Phil! I’ve just ordered my Freeze dryer so I’m power watching FD videos. I remember seeing a video of you weighing your food as you dry and you recorded the particulars of each load. Do you have a standard excel template you use to record all the important aspects of each load along with maintenance templates? I feel like there’s so much information to take in at the beginning that I’m going to forget the best conditions for different foods and I’d like to start out as organized as possible. Thanks for doing this so we don’t all have to re-invent the wheel ☺️
A lot of my weighing was for data collection. However, weighing your food before and after will help you add the correct amount of water to reconstitute it.
Thank you for this video. I'm trying to figure out how to do my own storage and inventory system. I think your method might work better than mine. How do you store the totes? For instance if you have 40 or more, how do you easily find the one you want to remove food from? Mine (so far) are separated by Protien, Fruit/veg, and Miscellaneous and 3 different sizes. I have only been freeze drying for a short time. I don't know which method would be easier to use - say 5 years down the line?
Thank you Phil. I was fortunate enough to find a local vendor that carries the harvest right freeze dryer‘s and they had one in stock so I bought mine several days ago. However I have not set it up yet. I’ve been binge watching videos from multiple current users, including yours, on the initial set up and the “bread run”. I am also mulling over placement because of the heat it generates. My home is well under 850 sq’ and no garage. I have been searching for some sort of chart(s) with general drying times for vegetables and fruits to start with. My thoughts are to place my hrfd in front of a window and “time” the drying process so that the majority will be done late afternoon and throughout the night during the Summer months or at least the last 12ish hours. I do not want to generate more heat then necessary inside the house or have to run my air conditioner constantly. Any thoughts?
Yes I do. It’s kind of where I’m thinking. Wow, that long? The video‘s I’ve been watching say 24 to 32 hours. My main focus for the next several months will be focused on vegetables; carrots, parsnips, orange squash's including pumpkin and turnips. My daughter is special-needs. She has strict dietary needs and all of her food needs to be puréed. My first plan is to dehydrate all of these vegetables listed individually and turn them into powders. My second plan is to cook her foods like I do now, purée them all together, pre-freeze then freeze dry and create individual meals much like the store bought baby food. Once I get a good supply of here food needs taken care of I will try other things, next year. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and your time.
Hi there, as regards record keeping, since we knew nothing I decided to use spiral notebooks to record trials and tribulations and other significant data. We quickly settled for one page per batch # to record Freeze time, Dry time and Elapsed Time. Batches are either all one item (Single) or mixed items (mixed). We also record weights in & out (Thanks Phil) to compute water removed. This data goes to our Spreadsheet: Inventory SS page has columns for batch #, date, item and wt in/wt out, bulk or MRE, Bag size/count, Jar size/count, location, notes. A second SS page, “Process Times” columns: Nomenclature (alphabetized), Next column(s) show batch # and F/D ET times. This column is repeated each time say “bananas” are processed and whether “S” - single item that batch or “m” mixed items. A sense of cycle times helps planning to avoid having to pull & package at 3AM. One conclusion: extra dry time is better than too little. We have added as much as 10 hours to “additional dry” to avoid having to get up that early. No significant problems and the electric bill seems to not suffer.
Thank you for this Phil! You may have covered this before but do you keep raw dried dried items in a separate box? Like green beans, carrots and etc. as opposed to a cooked meal or a fixed dish.
This issue was discussed with a Dr, Ahlborn PhD in food sciences. I'm working on a video concerning issues such as these. The short answer is there is little if any transference of microbes during the freeze dry process. Many microbes can't survive the FD process, those that do are cyro-frozen. So once the food is rehydrated, you need to treat it as fresh and raw until cooked.
The three things you need to watch out for are: Ultraviolet light, temperatures, and Oxygen. Properly sealed Mylar or polyester bags with PVDF (Polyvinylidene Fluoride) will stop any UV light. The problem is not all bags, claiming to be Mylar, are really Mylar. many are polyester or vinyl counterfeits. A good bag can have the sunshine on it without problems as long as it remains between 50-70 degrees. Heat will shorted shelf life.
Great video! Excellent system and the idea to store some bags upside down in order to fit more in is alone, "worth the price of admission".
Glad it was helpful!
LOL - "It depends on how much inflation was this month" :D
It’s very generous of you to share your inventory method. I don’t own a freeze dryer-yet, but I hope to in the future. Watching your channel and other channels with similar informative information has been a true blessing.
Christmas is coming
Thanks Phil! As your resident Philadelphian, your description of scrapple is 100% accurate. The spices added make all the difference. 😜
I forgot to mention the added sawdust from the floor.
@@Philat4800feet I'm in Pennsylvania as well, Huntingdon County in the middle of the state. They also put really gross things in scrapple, like eyeballs. When I heard that I said, no way for this gal!
Thank you! I downloaded.im new only 3rd batch. This is perfect. I love EXCEL
Phil, I’m still waited on my FD, but I developed an MS Access Database to track my FD batches and Food Inventory, including non-FD items. It tracks food type, amount, nutrition, location, batch, tray, wet weight, dry weight, date, source, cost, power consumption, When disposed, comments, etc. Once I’ve refined it with use a little, I would be happy to share, if anyone is interested.
Let me know
ME too! :) I love spreadsheets but it takes me FOREVER to get formulas and formatting just right. I wanted to add Pie Charts and Graphs but have no clue how to do that yet either. So much to learn yet.
Thank you for this video. I was trying to figure out how I was going to keep track of all my FD items when my FDer arrives next week. I love spreadsheets so this is how I'm going to log everything. You explained it very clearly and it's exactly what I needed. Thank you again!
Glad it was helpful!
I love your system! One suggestion: it's possible to save all of this info in a single file using tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet. My first tab is the Master List, tab 2 is Tote 1, tab 3 is Tote 2, etc. You can rename the tabs by double-clicking on the tab name. One advantage of yours is that you can open both files side-by-side so that the cut & paste function can be seen at once. Just a matter of preference.
I appreciate your methodical way of doing things. Since so much of your information is data-driven, I feel it is more trustworthy than other sources. Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us!
Yup, you are correct
My method is to fill a tote of similar items. Cheese, dairy, meat and protein, fruits and veggies, snacks, and meals. Then once a tote is filled it goes to storage. Then I take from the oldest tote.
Two questions, What are funeral potatoes? and how do you freeze Dry Cheese, Cheddar, Sharp? I love your channel. Thanks.
It's a mixture of Hash Brown potatoes, cream of mushroom soup, sour cream and other ingredients.
When I FD cheese, I use shredded cheese.
@@Philat4800feet The potatoes sound good. How do you rehydrate the cheese? Others on TH-cam say it gets slimy.
I use a spray bottle to rehydrate shredded cheese. And it can be tricky.
A great way to keep track but what serving size is in each bag? Was the Yellow squash raw or cooked? one squash per bag? Large Pro,Thanks-Mike
Goods questions. Serving size would be based if the food was a side dish or a component ingredient. It depends on diet and eating habits. Many of us should take the advice of our mothers and eat more vegetables. In my case the veggies were blanched. I like to pick squash while the blossom is still on and seeds aren't developed.
@@Philat4800feet Plenty of room to label the bags, If the Ship hits the sand and we have no power to run a computer, vacuum pump ,bag sealerZip lock is all we get. I hope you have a good source of fresh water and a hand pump. Today we did apples with our wall mounted French fry cutter and 500 Vit. C water.
Super helpful!
So glad!
Hey this is just a suggestion but if you convert all your data into tables (Ctrl T) you can do all that sorting with the headers on your data.
Nice thing about technology...there is always something new to learn.
Thank you for sharing these files and information! I have my FD on order, and this will allow me to use the inventory tracker forms from the start. Thanks again!
Does you wife put maple syrup on her scrapple? If not, she should try it. It's good on Spam, too.
I am accustomed to getting looks from people about how I eat certain things. Being from New Jersey, I put ketchup on scrambled eggs, which gets some odd looks from the natives in NC where I live now. LOL
Take care and God Bless.
You don't have to be from New Jersey to put ketchup on eggs...they taste better that way. My wife eats her scrapple plain, but a kid her about adding extra saw dust to it.
Love this Phil!! Thank you for sharing! Have you considered having all the totes as tabs in the one file, and using functions to auto-generate the master list?
That could work
Excellent idea! I used to do this when I was still working and it made things a lot easier. Instead of a bunch of individual documents, you have one document with all your "pages". Thanks for posting!
I was just about to say the same. Lol. Phil, I love your channel! Thank you for sharing your knowledge. I’ve been waiting on my machine for 6 weeks. Suppose to be here next week.
Great inventory control system Phil! I can't help but wonder, where are you able to store ALL of those totes? I use very similar ones, but they really do take up A LOT of space?
Many of them totes are squatting at my children's homes
@Ed Heinlein - My home is under 850 sq feet so I am always trying to figure out unique storage ideas.
Get rid of your coffee and end tables. Stack two containers, throw a cloth over them, wa la, you have an end table. The same can be used as bedside tables.
Set two side by side, cover, you now have a coffee table.
I don’t know how tall your containers are but possibly you could put risers on your beds and shove them under. I use under bed storage containers, they are long and not very deep. I can stack two on top of each other. Depending on the size of your beds think of the possibilities. Eight will fit perfectly under a twin size bed.
And don’t forget closets, they often have a lot of wasted space above and below.
Excel is Awesome, just wish they would stop making changes to it. I don't even have my first tote filled yet, Thanks for sharing
Excellent method! PS use Open Office for a free, better, clone, of Microsoft Excel/Word/Powerpoint - full functions of Excel, can read and write Excel documents too
What is the point of the list you put inside the tote? I've been storing my food in totes as well but haven't been keeping a list like this, I put all veggies in one tote and meat in another etc. I like your idea and think it would organize me.
Just an extra copy if the outside one gets damaged/lost
Hi Phil! I’ve just ordered my Freeze dryer so I’m power watching FD videos. I remember seeing a video of you weighing your food as you dry and you recorded the particulars of each load. Do you have a standard excel template you use to record all the important aspects of each load along with maintenance templates? I feel like there’s so much information to take in at the beginning that I’m going to forget the best conditions for different foods and I’d like to start out as organized as possible. Thanks for doing this so we don’t all have to re-invent the wheel ☺️
A lot of my weighing was for data collection. However, weighing your food before and after will help you add the correct amount of water to reconstitute it.
You mentioned Bacon! How did you FD your bacon?
th-cam.com/video/Qtgak6dDjUs/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for this video. I'm trying to figure out how to do my own storage and inventory system. I think your method might work better than mine. How do you store the totes? For instance if you have 40 or more, how do you easily find the one you want to remove food from? Mine (so far) are separated by Protien, Fruit/veg, and Miscellaneous and 3 different sizes. I have only been freeze drying for a short time. I don't know which method would be easier to use - say 5 years down the line?
Thank you Phil. I was fortunate enough to find a local vendor that carries the harvest right freeze dryer‘s and they had one in stock so I bought mine several days ago. However I have not set it up yet. I’ve been binge watching videos from multiple current users, including yours, on the initial set up and the “bread run”.
I am also mulling over placement because of the heat it generates. My home is well under 850 sq’ and no garage. I have been searching for some sort of chart(s) with general drying times for vegetables and fruits to start with. My thoughts are to place my hrfd in front of a window and “time” the drying process so that the majority will be done late afternoon and throughout the night during the Summer months or at least the last 12ish hours. I do not want to generate more heat then necessary inside the house or have to run my air conditioner constantly. Any thoughts?
Could you put the FD near, or in, an open window on the North side of your house? It will take 36-40 hours to run a load.
Yes I do. It’s kind of where I’m thinking.
Wow, that long? The video‘s I’ve been watching say 24 to 32 hours.
My main focus for the next several months will be focused on vegetables; carrots, parsnips, orange squash's including pumpkin and turnips. My daughter is special-needs. She has strict dietary needs and all of her food needs to be puréed. My first plan is to dehydrate all of these vegetables listed individually and turn them into powders.
My second plan is to cook her foods like I do now, purée them all together, pre-freeze then freeze dry and create individual meals much like the store bought baby food. Once I get a good supply of here food needs taken care of I will try other things, next year.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge and your time.
Hi there, as regards record keeping, since we knew nothing I decided to use spiral notebooks to record trials and tribulations and other significant data. We quickly settled for one page per batch # to record Freeze time, Dry time and Elapsed Time. Batches are either all one item (Single) or mixed items (mixed). We also record weights in & out (Thanks Phil) to compute water removed. This data goes to our Spreadsheet: Inventory SS page has columns for batch #, date, item and wt in/wt out, bulk or MRE, Bag size/count, Jar size/count, location, notes. A second SS page, “Process Times” columns: Nomenclature (alphabetized), Next column(s) show batch # and F/D ET times. This column is repeated each time say “bananas” are processed and whether “S” - single item that batch or “m” mixed items. A sense of cycle times helps planning to avoid having to pull & package at 3AM. One conclusion: extra dry time is better than too little. We have added as much as 10 hours to “additional dry” to avoid having to get up that early. No significant problems and the electric bill seems to not suffer.
Thank you for this Phil! You may have covered this before but do you keep raw dried dried items in a separate box? Like green beans, carrots and etc. as opposed to a cooked meal or a fixed dish.
This issue was discussed with a Dr, Ahlborn PhD in food sciences. I'm working on a video concerning issues such as these. The short answer is there is little if any transference of microbes during the freeze dry process. Many microbes can't survive the FD process, those that do are cyro-frozen. So once the food is rehydrated, you need to treat it as fresh and raw until cooked.
Hey Phil... just curious, what state are you in?
My wife thinks I'm in a state of confusion.
Scrapple, isn't that like Spam? 😱
Scrapple to SPAM is like a paper airplane to the space shuttle.
@@Philat4800feet I agree with you about Scrapple.. ugh.....
Why would you have them in the hot sun coming in the window? This is a good way to cause food spoilage.
The three things you need to watch out for are: Ultraviolet light, temperatures, and Oxygen. Properly sealed Mylar or polyester bags with PVDF (Polyvinylidene Fluoride) will stop any UV light. The problem is not all bags, claiming to be Mylar, are really Mylar. many are polyester or vinyl counterfeits. A good bag can have the sunshine on it without problems as long as it remains between 50-70 degrees. Heat will shorted shelf life.