Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire We bought a freeze dryer

Be aware of anything that has a lot of air in it. The 2d stage of freezing also is in a vacuum. The air will greatly expand...and I mean GREATLY. A while back a friend said he loved freeze dried taffy and asked me do some. He unwrapped all the pieces for me but then left them in a hot car where they melted into a big lump. He sliced it up and we tried it. The slices were too thick and they swelled enough to clog up the whole thing. I had to dismantle the drying chamber to get it out. Luckily it dissolved readily in water so it wasn't bad to clean up.
Most ice cream dries ok but some brands seem to have lots of air whipped in. Those will expand a lot.
Speaking of ice cream - you know those Mtn House freeze dried ice cream sandwiches that sell for about $4 each? You can make your own for the price of the sandwiches, usually well under $1, plus the bag. Walmart sells some really cheap but you'll like the more expensive ice cream better.

WTH is this freeze dried skittles thing?

Will it work with Jelly Belly beans too?

I'm getting ready to dig up a 4x8 bed of taters. Freeze drying might work good on them for camping. You tried it yet? Maybe I should send you some if this bed has as many as I'm hoping???

OH, pics of the skittles or.........................................

I do dehydrated shredded potatoes for hash browns. It's too easy and fast.

Going to try that myself this year.

Have a bunch of apples, and peppers to do first. The taters will hold in the well house for awhile.

Hope that thing works out well for you.

Skittles blow up like popcorn. People sell them for 20.00 per lb.

Gottdam!

I wonder what a jelly bean would do?

How do you do eggs? Do you cook them first. We're having a hard time staying ahead of our xhickens.

Bb

What the heck? Why would anyone but one of those contraptions on purpose?

I have never heard of such a thing.

I did a batch of scrambled eggs for a scout troop. We cooked them first. That way when camping you just need hot water. Link sausages don't do well freeze drying. The fat doesn't dry and they get hard as rocks. They won't reconstitute well at all. Sausage patties crumbled into scrambled eggs did quite well. Raw eggs can be frozen, too, but we haven't tried it.
You can do meat either before or after cooking. If you dry it raw, you'll have to cook it after reconstituting it. Freeze drying bacteria won't kill the bugs. They go dormant and will survive for decades.

That gets us to freezer burn. That's when raw food, especially meat, dries out after being frozen. The process is called sublimation when water goes from a solid to a gas without melting. It causes the meat to be tough and leathery with changes in texture and color. It's still safe to eat unless it's gone rancid but will absorb bad tastes from the freezer. Most of the problems are caused by oxygen.
This is the same process used by freeze drying - sublimation. The difference is that freeze drying is done over a couple of days, not over months or years. Once it's dried, it's then stored in mylar bags with a pad to absorb oxygen. It can keep 10 to 15 years safely.

Does Ali Express sell a clone?

Since power consumption has come up a couple times.. a freeze drier does use more power than a dehydrator. However, the food will last much longer, over 20 years in many cases. No dehydrated food will last anywhere near that long. Also, freeze dried food retains much more of the nutrients compared to dehydrated. The taste and texture of the dried food is much different than dehydrated. Which is best is personal preference. We use both. We prefer dehydrated apples and prunes, freeze dried tomatoes and nectarines.

You can't really compare it to a deep freeze. A deep freeze has to keep the food frozen indefinitely so it runs 24/7/365. A freeze drier runs a couple days and then it's done.

There are some YouTube videos that I have watched that have perked my interest.
None of them say much about the Power requirements other than the large unit requiring a dedicated 20amp service for it.

Thanks for the Info about power
When I go off grid. It looks like I will have to run a Generator when using one.
Still Gas Price and harvesting your own food verses driving 2 hours to town and purchasing food.
I think that Freeze Drying and Dehydrating along with Canning are the way to go.

We have some friend that Can Potatoes and they do not have a very good track record.
Home Grown Potatoes are the Boom over store bought but their canning only gets them a little over 50% success.
To me that is a waist.

We have the medium Harvestright. We run it on a 15A circuit along with other lights, etc.

If you run it on a generator, be sure it never runs out of fuel. If the drier goes off mid-cycle, it will have to start over.
I haven't tried potatoes. They're so cheap here that it's not worth even growing them. They'll keep fresh if you have a good cool place to store them. You can't store them with apples. Apples produce ethylene gas which causes potatoes to spoil early.

Why in hell would you freeze dry beer?

I've heard of it but have no intentions of trying it. The drying takes out all the water AND alcohol. To reconstitute it, you have to add both fizz water and alcohol (Everclear maybe?). I think it would be lacking in what I expect beer to taste like. There's actually a big craft beer maker from Denmark that sells the powder.

No. You use powdered maltodextrin that is mixed into the beer. Guinness Stout works the best. The alcohol actually becomes powdered like everything else. While it is not carbonated it is regular but flat tasting beer that works great when you are backpack hunting.

Drying alcohol to a powder requires some complex chemical reactions, usually using an acid. It can't be done by just drying it out. It becomes either a different liquid or a gas, neither of which is alcohol. It can't be rehydrated with water.

Any of you play with the candy settings? My wide is about to run a batch.

Tag. Good info here