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

A long time ago I was involved in a dehydrator project that used a heat sink panel to track the sun and residual heat was pulled off the sink and the heated air was blown over the dried food. Different algorithms were used for different food types and the temperature was closely monitored (to stop caramelisation of the sugars) as was the humidity (add more airflow to speed up the drying process). The selling points were free energy to dry the fruit/vegetable, and no UV radiation to destroy the nutrients of the food.

I'm sure that a dehydrator would damage some nutrients but my understanding was no where near what sun drying did. That fact wasn't part of my brief, that's just what I was told and never did any lab experiments to confirm or deny it. I'm sure someone has done the studies.

And I would also assume that the method you have chosen would be the best...but again, don't know for sure.

Ran across this by accident and hope there is info in it of use to someone...

Quick update.

The chicken pasta worked perfectly. Rehydrates just fine and is also almost like a crunchy cracker snack if you eat a piece! You'd absolutely have to drink a lot of water if you ate it that way but it tastes great either way. I'm super happy with them because I now have about 13 MRE meals in our long term storage that will be useful either for individual meals while we're camping, get home bags, or just a quick and convenient meal when we're pushed for time or if the whole house is sick and we don't have the oomph to cook a full meal.

The best thing about these bags are that they're heat rated, which means we can open them up, pour some boiling water in, seal it closed and wait ten minutes or so and we'll have hot meals ready to go.

I bought a bunch of trays that fit into the machine that allow me to do single serving portions. That's handy for MRE sized meals but also to do small batches of individual produce. For example, I didn't have quite enough to do all of the trays with the chicken pasta so I broke out a bag of sliced frozen mushrooms that I'd already processed to FD. That one tray was the right size for adding to on meal so instead of opening a whole large bag and having to use it pretty quickly or rebatch it into vacuum sealed jars, I can just use that small amount and move on.

I won't do that often. But it's handy!


 

I'm putting the mince in to start tonight but I've realised that I have a small dilemma in that I don't have a lot of space to store all of these bags! They take up far less space in our pantry than our original solution of jars and cans and they're definitely lighter for sure. But being able to reserve so much food means we're going to have to start looking into more storage options in cool conditions. At the moment we have a crate in our dining area and that's not really sustainable. 

The only place I can think of that MIGHT work in the shorter term is under our bed but that's extremely difficult to access because of the heavy mattress. I'm a bit hesitant to use that space for anything that we might want to access quickly in an emergency but the garage is simply far too hot to store LTS food in. 
Hmmm. It's a dilemma. We'll probably get away with garage storage in the cooler months but when it's hot it's definitely not the optimal choice.

I think my family might have something to say if I tried to fill out ENTIRE backyard with a shipping container 🤣. We might have three times the space that we had in our rental property but we don't have THAT much space!

Should try selling stuff Stealth...get that machine paying for itself.

I'm actually considering it. We have a monthly farmer's market not too far away from us and there's regular stalls that have things like toffee apples, icecream, desserts and the like. I suspect I could sell freeze dried lollies there very easily and at a sizable profit purely because of the novelty of the items.

I might start pricing it up and see what I'd have to sell at to make a tidy profit. Lollies work well because they have a very short run time cycle (about 2-3 hours) compared to other things like freeze dried icecream that can take a couple of days depending on a few variables. But lollies are a quick turnover item so it might go well. I think I'll start researching requirements for selling there. The only problem that I can foresee is the requirement for portable eftpos because people automatically assume that you'll have it. 

If it's an expensive outlay it might not be worth it to do. Then again I've seen homeless people with eftpos tap and pay chips when folks say they don't have cash so who knows *chortle*.

Already tried liquorice, it didn't work! A few gummy type things that I've tried didn't work. I know that they DO work though because I've seen others do it. I suspect that the trick they're using is to pre-heat the lollies in the oven to almost melting point before putting them into the machine so I might give that a go at some point.

Sorry, the land here is for family survival only, but, if you just turn up here, u better have at least 6 months supplies, be totally self sufficient in power etc (water we can supply), and be ready to work in the gardens.



When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it is attached to the rest of the world.

I hit a milestone this week. Our crate of FD'd food is now full, and we need to buy a new crate to start filling! The crate is actually even more full than in this picture, it's at the brim at this point and I can't even squeeze a single bag into the top.



Also my outlaws brought an extremely generous gift this morning as well. They know a grower whose tomato crop is literally sitting on the vines wasting away because the cost to hire people to come and collect the fruit is too high. It's not worth it for them, so instead they've been letting people take whatever they want. Anything that's not taken by friends or family etc. is being left so that the cows can come in and eat it. 
While I'm sorry to hear that someone is so disadvantaged it was a lucky win for us because my outlaws brought us several buckets of beautifully vine-ripened tomatoes for free! Well of course our minds instantly went to sauces and the like. 

But I'm also going to FD a heap of them and turn them into tomato powder to reconstitute as a passata or tomato paste depending on what we want to use it for. All I have to do is cut them up and gut out the seeds. 



So we're taking advantage of a situation that would be happening regardless, but it still doesn't feel great to hear that someone's livelihood is taking such a massive hit. 

I did a clean of my machine on the weekend and I now have 3L of low fat milk FDing. Apparently it tastes just like fresh milk on reconstitution (unlike powdered milk that you can buy in bags etc) and given that my machine has had a full deep clean I thought now was a good time to try a product that can absorb smells readily if it's not sparkling clean. Milk is definitely something that you really miss when it's gone and can be difficult to source in times of need so I figure if it works well it's definitely something I can and will stockpile. 

I plan to do a few batches if it works out ok, but I definitely will have to do a clean between processes because after the tomatoes I'll be doing a big batch of garlic! The onion that we did made the garage smell of fresh onions for a few days so I can only imagine what garlic would do to FD'd milk 🤣. The garlic is fairly large diced because the chopper I used doesn't get any smaller, but it really doesn't make that big of a difference so I'm happy with it as is. 

 

And finally, I did a bunch of FD'd maple and cinnamon porridge for ready meals. I've seen in a few FB groups that people don't really get the point of FD'ing porridge because oats store very well if bagged properly and can last for years. Initially I thought FDing porridge was a bit of a waste of time too! But then I realised that when it comes to cooking, all I'll have to do is pour in a cup of boiling water and set it aside for a few minutes to rehydrate.
If it was raw oats it would take several minutes of active boiling in a pot that would make dishes to be cleaned, and would have to be monitored while it cooks. This way I can just throw a couple of bags into a pack and they're good to go the second you've brought some water to boil. On top of that if you simply can't boil water you can still pour could water in and eat it. It won't be anywhere near as nice, but it'd be way better than uncooked oats.



So that's my most recent update. I need to make more instant meals because they're handy. I need to get a new crate to fill. I need to do more proteins. But probably top on my list is figuring out what to put in a full day MRE meal pack that's nutritious and balanced. Mostly so that I can put something together that I can throw into bags and not even consider whether or not it's 'enough'.