Freeze Dried Cheese: How to Hydrate it part II

Freeze Dried Cheese has been a challange for me.  The first time I hydrated it, I used warm water...

It Melted.    Duh.   Should have know that.

I've continued to have challenges:

A few weeks ago, I was with a group of Shelf Reliance consultants in Hawaii.  We were preparing for a very large show where we planned to demonstrate how to cook with THRIVE food.   We were expecting 75-150 people and had four different "taste testing" stations planned: Pizza, Tacos, Breakfast and Smoothies.  I was in charge of the pizza station.  So I went to work hydrating my mozzarella freeze dried cheese using the method I outlined earlier.  I found out that my earlier tips really only work well for a small batch of cheese: not 10+ cups!


Putting 10 cups of sopping wet cheese into a strainer in hot humid Hawaii just turned it into a big old wet cheese ball.  I so wish I'd taken a picture: it was hilarious.  It was just to heavy and didn't drain at all.  Luckily, I didn't waste the cheese: we used it in the breakfast casserole that we pre-made.  It was just going to be melted there anyway.

But I still needed shredded cheese for people to add to their pizzas in a few hours.  What to do?.....

I spread 3-4 cups of freeze dried cheese out on a piece of tin foil like this:

and then I sprayed it with a spray bottle.  I let it soak up all that water and then I sprayed it again.  I repeated the process 8-10 times over about 15-20 minutes turning the cheese a bit each time.  Eventually it was completely hydrated and just a bit too wet.  So, I added about 3/4 cup cornstarch to a large ziploc and then added the cheese bit by bit, shaking it around to coat.  It worked beautifully!  The cheese looked and tasted just like fresh shredded cheese you buy at the store.  No one knew the difference.

Anyone else had experience hydrating freeze dried cheese?


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