Cereal Conumdrum

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Bishop

Full Member
Jan 25, 2014
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If an unopened box of regular cereal has shelf life of a year with four to six months once opened.
Why is Freeze Dried Muesli sold as camping food?
 

Toddy

Mod
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Jan 21, 2005
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S. Lanarkshire
Water content I presume. Things like raisins and sultanas aren't freeze dried, and they're pretty common in muesli.

Also, most regular 'breakfast cereals' have a 'crunch appeal'. Soft and soggy rice krispies are pretty awful, and stale cornflakes just taste foosty.

M
 
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Toddy

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Jan 21, 2005
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S. Lanarkshire
I'm no' fond of fruity stuff in my porridge. I like the fruit fine, just not mixed into the oats :)

Little wild strawberries, the hautbois ones, naturally dry out on the plants here. Wizened we call them. Tasty little crunchy flavour bombs :)

I'm not surprised your Nutella lasted so long, it's mostly sugar. I've just checked the jar in the pantry, and it says,
Sugar, Palm Oil, Hazelnuts (13%), Fat reduced cocoa (7.4%), Skimmed milk powder (6.6%) Whey powder, soya lecithin, vanillin.

Note those percentages…those are the only ones they give, so since they have to give the largest ingredient first that means that the sugar and the palm fats must be more than 60% of the jar. (I make allowance for the whey at being just less than the 6.6% of the skimmed milk, and the same for the soya lecithin. I reckoned the vanillin is simply flavouring)

So, yeah, really healthy that :)
Tasty though :D
 

Toddy

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Jan 21, 2005
38,937
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S. Lanarkshire
Too sweet for me. I don't mind it used as an ingredient, but not eaten on it's own. It's like peanut butter that way. Peanut butter is great for gravies and sauces, but the thought of it's claggy stickiness on a piece or cracker is just a no for me.
I have taken a liking to marmite chocolate though :D Best of both worlds, it's chocolate and it's embued with salty yeasty goodness :D

M
 

Robson Valley

Full Member
Nov 24, 2014
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McBride, BC
Nutella is a petroleum derivative made by the Canadian Tar Sands oil refineries. Can I interest you in some muk-tuk from Tuktoyaktuk?

Oxidation is rusting in foods. Have to admit that stale carbs are about the worst. I don't think that anything can top a 2 yr old open bag of Asian steam-fried noodles.

If you've got some means to process it, dried ripe mature grain will last for thousands of years.
Bat Cave, New Mexico holds some 30,000 cobs of corn/maize, at least 10,000 yrs old. Dry.
 

Toddy

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Jan 21, 2005
38,937
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S. Lanarkshire
There are grains found in excavations in both the Middle and Far east that are thousands of years old too, and they are still instantly recognisable. You're right about the dryness too.

Thank you but no; I don't eat dead whales. Heck of a lot of calories in a whale though.

M
 

Robson Valley

Full Member
Nov 24, 2014
9,959
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McBride, BC
Nutella is reactor scrapings from the Tar Sands. Happy to sell all of it.

Egyptian pyramid wheat germinates.
I'd like a time machine to hop along the time line and follow the development of cheese and leavened bread.
Just this week, the DNA heritage of apples has been published, they spread both east and west along the Silk Road
from a small district in Khasakstan (sp?). Fine piece of work by a big team.

Wanuskewin is a First Nations village known to have been occupied for 6,000 years in Canada.
For western Canada, a nearly ideal shelter from winter weather and gloriously sunny on a river bank in the summers.
Even had it's own buffalo jump.
Anyway:
Recently, several large stones have been excavated which appear to be mill stones.
The work now is to try to clean the surfaces to recover phytoliths, plant parts, which
may indicate the grains, if any, that were processed and consumed.

Grains are grass seeds. In Canada, there were two different prairie landscapes: tall-grass prairie (waist deep) and short grass prairie (knee deep).
Neither one of them produced any grass seed which was easily threshed at all. I know only of one small patch of short-grass
prairie which has never seen the plow or cattle. All long-grass prairie has been destroyed.

So if the rocks are mill stones, the processing is a great mystery.
 

Toddy

Mod
Mod
Jan 21, 2005
38,937
4,570
S. Lanarkshire
Dried roots grind too though, as does the roasted and dried inner bark of trees….that's full of sugars.
Interesting to hear what they decide though.

I've excavated two saddle querns, very distinctive shapes, and I've used saddle querns to grind flour enough to know that yes their presence on a site indicates farming, and that they had grain or carbohydrates of some kind, but it also tells me that it was damned hard work to make that flour. Bashed and boiled grains are much easier to make/eat than grinding it and baking it.
 

Robson Valley

Full Member
Nov 24, 2014
9,959
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McBride, BC
Any effots to investigate the stone surfaces for distinctive starch grains? The sure don't all look the same.
Roots and inner barks. Of course. Roots for sure.
Most of those prairie plants had substantial root systems to endue periodic fire storms across the grassland.
They would be sprouting up in a few weeks, they still do, here.

I think that I've walked across the Wanuskewin hill side where they grew the wild onions.
Imagine a stunted specimen of a store-bought green onion (scallion?) with no more than 3 x 20cm green leaves.
I'd like to go back there as I have 2 different ideas about the location of the kitchen gardens (big village, too.)
 

Alan 13~7

Settler
Oct 2, 2014
571
5
Prestwick, Scotland
Things like raisins and sultanas aren't freeze dried, and they're pretty common in muesli.

Also, most regular 'breakfast cereals' have a 'crunch appeal'.

M

Here's a question still on freeze dried fruits, Where Can I buy just the freeze dried fruit like for instance the red berries in special K?
 

Toddy

Mod
Mod
Jan 21, 2005
38,937
4,570
S. Lanarkshire
Brilliant Mary exactly what I was after thank you so much my own search for freeze dried products had been fruitless:lmao::You_Rock_


:D

Not cheap, but the freeze dried fruit powders are really, really good in stuff. From ice cream and icing, to yoghurt and teas.

M
 

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