I bought my wife some freeze dried skittles from a coworker. My wife loved them.

Aaaaaaand now we have a freeze dryer.

I have been looking at them
The cost right now is what is stopping me
Let us know how it works for ya.

Just got the test run done. -50f in a few minutes. Vac pump (premiere) is very quiet. Should be making her happy by sundown.

Details please.

Damn that was easy

I’m gonna try it 😀

Just got a Harvest Right, as well (medium size).

Yet to do the maiden voyage.

Friend of mine has one. You couldn't run fast enough to give me one. We do a lot of food preservation but almost everything I have had out of his freeze dryer I wouldn't eat unless it was an end of the world life or death situation. Takes a lot of power and and a lot of time to freeze dry things.

Can’t even eat fresh skittles.

Mrs slumlord would shuck out the bucks for some freeze dried caramel popcorn

That’s how I’ll do it

We bought the large with premier pump. I typically consume about $500 worth of mtn house between camping and hunting....Hopefully my wife can nail down the perfect recipes.

They have a small one for $2600 at the local ranch store, I keep looking but have no idea how well they work.

They rock. We’ve had one for a year. You can freeze dry beer. Nuff said.

RockChuck has one of those. Last year he gave me some tomatoes and fruit he had done. They were really good.

HarvestRight is the only US company that makes home sized ones. They aren't cheap, that's for sure. We got ours about a year ago and have done quite a bit with it.
I don't recommend you buy bags from them. They don't have a bellows bottom and won't hold very much. Plus, you pay extra for all the fancy printing they put on them. You can find mylar bags for much less online.

Here's something to try - tomatoes. Dry them sliced about 1" thick, then grind them to a powder for storage. You can get a bushel of tomatoes in a couple quart jars that way, just by getting rid of the air. You can use them in recipes or just sprinkle the powder on stuff. It'll have all the same taste.
WARNING: dried tomatoes will attract moisture immediately after they come out of the drier. Be ready to bag or grind them right away or they'll start to get sticky from moisture. You really don't want to leave them out overnight.

Energy Consumption is what I am concerned about.
In the future I will be using it Off Grid from Solar Panels and Batteries
The Panels I can add as needed. The Batteries I can Not easily add and I really do not want to run a generator all night long during the Cycles of the Freeze Dryer.

I just thought of an amazing Christmas present for my bride.

A drier will use between 1000 and 1200 watts/hr depending on a number of variables. Most things take about 48 hrs to dry but some will take considerably longer if they have a high water content. You can shorten the freezing cycle by 5 or 6 hours by pre-freezing the stuff in your home freezer. We do that all the time. With tomatoes, for example, we'll slice and freeze them in cheap foil pans. We can then store them frozen in grocery bags and freeze dry them as time allows. We do a lot of fruits that way. It can takes weeks of freeze drier time to dry a bushel of peaches, for example. We just slice and freeze them and then dry them a batch at a time.
We did a couple batches of blackberries a while back. Those things took forever, something like 90 hours. They just have so much water in them.

Kiwis and honeydew mellons are about the best things we have done so far. Hatch chilies are great but it takes three batches of skittles to get the hotness out of the machine. Watermelon is very good but it takes a long time.

It takes a lot of freeze-drying to break-even on costs over time but .... it eventually happens if you do enough of it and the machine doesn't break-down. (Oiless pumps have made them better over the years.)

Costs:

Home grown veggies and meats or/either storebought or farmer's market veggies and meats.

Plow/tiller, gas and oil, fertilizer, seeds, feed, time and effort.

Our power bill increased (between 2018, 2019 and 2020 year over year in harvest months, garden and hunting, about 110% when I was running a batch a day in July, August, September, October, November and December.

Cost of the machine itself.

Figure you prorate the machine over five years through depreciation. Roughly $1100 for five years (oil free large).

Another couple of grand a year to feed it (we dehydrate everything from scrambled eggs to elk and everything inbetween.)

Figure, here in the south where we have mild winters and four or five growing seasons per year ... you'll double your power bill but let's say $200 a month to run the Harvest Right.

Over five years with a large oil free, $1100 a month plus $200 a month to feed it plus $200 a month in power consumption .... $1500 a year over five years not counting mylar and buckets and O² absorbers ... you know what, figure $1600 a year minimum not counting time and effort.

That's $8000 investment over five years minimum .... and $8000 will buy you a lot of Mountain House, pallets of Emegency Essentials.

We still love ours, it affords-us a lot of freedom and independence. (We still buy Morning Moo but we have freeze dried buckets of just about anything and everything else.)

Just understand going-in ... it becomes an obsession. I ended-up doing a special canning and freeze drying room in the barn just to get ours out of the kitchen and running all night.

Word to the wise .... keep the pieces of meat small going-in. The smaller the better. Cut veggies thick. Scramble eggs and pour them deep on the tray, uncooked. Premix salt and pepper. Ice cream sandwiches are the bomb. Don't waste your time on legumes. Do cheese but powder it. Milk is a waste of time and cheaper to buy (Morning Moo). Greasy things (like chocolate) do not do well.

Lots of other things, other than food, can be freeze-dried btw.

I'm partial to freeze dried cheese for popcorn. Rhubarb is good also

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

You might want to correct your spelling error before she sees it. LOL!

Harvestright? Just a week or 2 ago, they did a software upgrade that included some new candy settings. Be sure to install the upgrades before you run it.

She ran a batch of sour taffy last night. The boys at work were impressed.

When we were researching food storage I came across a video where some folks hooked their Harvest Right to a Kill-O-Watt meter to measure energy consumption during a complete cycle with their medium size drier packed with all trays loaded.

They used 14 kWh to do an entire cycle, and this was over a 26 hour period....so the usage is spread out which is good....gives us off gridders time to generate more electrons.

Here is the video. Go to 9:45 if you are only interested in the electricity usage. But they do go into cost comparisons and taste tests in the video. FYI, they used $1.40 of grid electricity to do an entire batch. They go into detail on the costs later in the video.

I haven't yet run a batch in 26 hrs. Most take 48 or longer. That photo looks like Harvestright's small drier. We have the medium. The small hold a lot less food so maybe it's faster.

Thanks for this
I have watched some of their videos and they are a good couple to watch.
They did say that they were using the middle Freeze Dryer and that is the one I was looking at getting when I bite the Bullet and get one
Thanks again for the info.

Thought I'd share some successes we've had.

Sweet potato chips. I slice the sweet potatoes in my meat slicer, sprinkle with Johnny's salt and dry. Crunchy like lays but no oil.

Canned grean beans....sprinkle with seasoning of choice and dry. Just like a veggie straw.

Great idea