"I bought a Harvest Right home freeze dryer." A saga.

I have one of those! The kids really like the 'apple slinkies' that they turn out lol. But you're right, they process them super quickly and it's great because instead of having to hand wash each individual apple to clear off commercial wax it peels them at the same time for me. Who knows what's sprayed on them 🤢.

For the ones from the local area we will wash them and keep them skin on, but you just move the blade back to keep the skins on and you're good to go. I'm on the hunt for any tools that I can find that make processing faster so that kind of gadget is super helpful ^_^

I finally delved into 'real' prep foods yesterday, cooked up 1kg of beef mince and put it in to dry. I followed an abundance of caution while preparing it for long term storage. I fried it off in a fry pan and then rinsed it in hot water to remove as much of the fat as possible. Then when I put it into the FDer, I put paper towels under it to absorb any remaining fat. 
Fortunately when I pulled them out of the machine there was no oily residue on the paper towels so I'm pretty confident that they'll easily store a full ten years without problems. There's plenty of arguments for not using paper towels because of the chemicals used for processing paper towel and just as many that say it makes absolutely no difference.

Well sure. But when my family is starving I'm pretty confident that we're not going to be all that worried about whether or not the paper was chemically treated 😂.

Anyway, two bags of 500g of beef mince ready to be thrown into a dish when we haven't got easy access to meat. Winning. I also got my hands on 3 dozen eggs that I have put into the deep freeze to process tomorrow because obviously prices are going up. I want to take advantage of the prices that we have local to us at the moment for as long as I can. So I'm on the hunt for meats that are relatively well priced and low fat (as they FD better and therefore store longer) to start filling up our FD food crate.

Today's efforts - I got 4 heads of broccoli for $2 and four huge zucchini for 99c each at the local market on Saturday so I spent about an hour breaking them all down. I steamed the broccoli and then threw it in an ice bath to stop the cooking process. End result, 1.5kg each of bright green tasty looking broccoli and cubed zucchini ready to freeze dry.
The broccoli has been running all day today. Once again it's been quite warm in the garage and the run time is longer as a result.

I was going to divide the batches between two large bags but I think I'll actually put them between four smaller ones. Mostly because even with a large family it's unlikely that I'll need 750g of each vegetable for one meal at a time lol.


   

I'm going to take as much advantage of the fresh food that's in season at the moment as I can. I've already seen a lot of people in American FB groups saying that it's now cheaper for them to buy a #10 can of Auguson Farms eggs than it is for them to buy fresh, because they were FD'd and priced in at last year's prices rather than the current prices.
I feel like that's something to take advantage of with the way prices are headed here.

I'm also looking at getting a market stall at a local rural market near us. It only runs once a month, but there's no specific requirement for a commercial kitchen or anything like that. I figure if I can do up enough batches of lollies and sell them at a reasonable price that might help provide a small amount of cash to inject into our house repayments. It'll be an experiment to run at least once I think. But not until we're settled and I can figure out reasonable pricing and the like. While other people still have disposable income it might be a good time to dabble.

I finally got my FLIR camera yesterday! I've had great fun playing around with it. I had a batch of zucchini in the FDer so of course I tested it with the camera to see any cold spots. Worked a charm. Keeping in mind that a FLIR camera can tell you if there's cold spots in your food but you have to use your common sense when using one.

For example, if I know that a tray is 14 degrees and there's a cold spot that's 10 degrees, that's going to show as one part that's cold because it's a different colour. But that doesn't mean everything else that's on the tray isn't cold too!
The whole thing is cold, it's just that that one spot is even colder. But it does take away a lot of the guess work of whether or not there's any water there still because if there is it'll show up colder in that area than the rest of the tray. You can see an example in the pictures below. In the tray on the right there's a darker area which would lead you to believe that the area was cooler. And it is. But it's also because that area is a part of the tray that doesn't have anything on it. It's cooled slightly from being in contact with the table underneath it, and the other parts of the tray look 'warmer' because they have product on them which are still retaining some heat from the drying process.

Fortunately the camera does have a function to take a measurement of the coldest and hottest part of the image as can be seen on the bottom right. That 21 degrees proves that there's nowhere on the tray that's anywhere close to 21 degrees. Any lower than that would show up as a dark blue/black spot on the tray and would as a result let me know that there was still frozen water inside some of the food. Pretty handy. It does mean that you have to assess all the information that the image provides with other tests like checking that the tray itself is warm and that things look and feel dry as well.

It was $500 for the camera so I guess I can add that to the running tally of FDing is expensive as heck 🤣. But as I've said before, it would be heartbreaking to spend all that time (and money!) on a FDer and the associated items only to find that half of my stored foods were rotten after a year. Worth the expense IMO.

Some people in FDing groups recommend water meters that detect the level of water in wood and as has been pointed out many times before. Wood is not food, and you have to test every single piece of food to ensure that it's all finished. Random testing is no better than randomly testing one or two pieces of food by crushing them. This way I can take a quick snapshot and throw it in for longer if there are cold spots or take it out and not waste electricity drying something that's already dry if there aren't.

  
There's a few different image settings so I'll have a play around with that and see if I can make it even easier. But even if it doesn't the ability to diagnose cold spots (and therefore ice still in the centre of your food) is invaluable. 

And as a side note today I'm processing a batch of vanilla French Toast. It's vanilla because apparently I've run out of the HUGE container of cinnamon that I had! Very simple recipe. A bit of milk, some eggs, some sugar, no fats for frying because I used a non-stick pan and they came up nice and crispy. Other FDers have recommended either slicing them into soldiers for French Toast dippers with maple syrup, or rehydrating with a lightly damp cloth in the bag overnight to eat in the morning. I did almost two whole loaves of bread. One loaf was texas sliced and the other was regular. But that should be enough for at least one breakfast per person in our family for at least... *counts in head* one breakfast? From two loaves? Tracks about right 🤣🤣🤣.

If they work out well though I'm going to make quite a lot more because it's a super simple breakfast that's relatively cheap and even easier to make than pancakes. I think pancakes might turn out a bit flimsy in the rehydration process and the integrity of the crust should hold it together a bit better when I put them into the mylar bags for long term storage (LTS). I'm also planning to attempt making individual sauce packets to put in each pack of toast. I'm tempted to use maple syrup but I think I'll do honey that can be very made very slightly more viscous by putting a bit of water in it. 

I'd prefer maple but honey's antibacterial properties make it a safer bet for LTS. Maple syrup has a great storage life too but there will likely be a small air bubble or two in the mylar slips that I'm going to try making and that will give enough space for mould or bacteria to grow. Shouldn't have that problem with honey.

One thing you might consider with the FLIR camera is if you find you are on top of your procedures here and you have no other use for it (unlikely but anyhoo), flog it on Ebay or some other site - people pay a bomb for them even second hand, so it's not one of those tools you will buy and it's worthless once you walk out of the shop with it...like hand tools etc. If you ever need a quick buck, you can move it on easily.

When winter comes you will be able to see where your house is leaking heat and take remedial action if you can. You will also see how crap single glazed windows are at leaking heat from the house. This sort of work makes it pay for itself pretty quick.

The shoe that I was waiting for dropped this weekend! I've been expecting something to go wrong for the last month and something finally did.

I went to put another cycle on and found the pump was emitting a smoky haze. Not all that uncommon if your demister needs a clean, but mildly worrying as it's not really something that should happen if your pump is working properly. Especially when it's so new. So I unscrewed the demister to clean the filter and found the heavy duty plastic thread for the filter that goes into the pump is broken! Not only that, but the filter wasn't screwed into the demister properly which is what resulted in the pump putting out the oil haze. Great. I've sent HR a ticket asking for a replacement so that I can continue to use it but haven't heard anything yet. It's a bit of a disappointment given that I've only had the pump for a month.
It'll take a solid two weeks to get it sent over when they DO see my ticket (or possibly longer) so we're looking at the machine being out of commission for that long at least. At least it's still covered by warranty!

It's a bit frustrating. But it's also been a great learning experience. I had to look up a video on how to take the demister apart to clean it and managed to do that quite easily. I'd been intimidated about the prospect of doing it earlier because maintaining pumps is something I've never even had glancing experience with. I knew when I bought the machine that I'd very likely have to do almost all of the maintenance myself. If not all of it. But I was mildly concerned about my ability to do so. So even though there's a broken part I learned something useful and now know for the future how to do it when the part is replaced.
It's also taught me to look over things and learn how to fix them before they break so that when they do I can diagnose the problem and fix it as soon as possible. When I get the new demister I'll know to check that the filter has been screwed in properly which I didn't know before and wasn't mentioned in any of the documentation they provided. Good learning experience.

We would have one too, if we had enough money to buy it ! But, she who must be obeyed is running the dehydrators every day, so much so that I have installed a separate power system just for them so they can be run into the evening without affecting the main battery's. It consists of a 1.8 kw solar array, Victron 150/100 regulator, 12 volt, 1,000 amp hour battery bank and a 2 kw Jaycar 240 volt inverter. There is also a small, 30 amp, 12 v Repco battery charger to top up the battery's if needed, This system also runs a small fridge/freezer for overflow grocery shopping use, and is enough to be able to finish off a whole dehydrating load per day in each dehydrator unit.

We store everything that we've dried in screw top glass bottles and jars, heaps usually available for almost nothing at the local Salvos shop.






Energy, in turn, can be used to create fuels and fertilizer, two inputs necessary for affordable food. In addition, the universe provides the sun which brings us heat, energy and photosynthesis, all for free.

Glad to see you are getting good use out of your freeze dryer, Stealth. Hope it's well worth the cost to buy, your time and in (solar) power. Sometimes the end result is worth it, even if financially or otherwise it takes a while to recoup. You have the food now, even if there is an emergency.