Recent Batches of Freeze Dried Food

Over the weekend while I was camping Hive account@stryeyz took care of the freeze dryer. When I left there was still a load in that finished on Saturday. It consisted of quite the variety of food. She had made up a bunch of scrambled eggs and cooked them before we put them on the trays.

A bunch of ice cream sandwiches were cut into smaller pieces and the other half of the tray was filled with Rice Pasta alfredo.

An entire tray was filled with shrimp fried rice from a dinner last week. The shrimp are larger sized and would probably dry faster if they were the salad shrimp.

The 2 round steaks were sliced into strips and laid onto the tray with the rest of the space being filled with mixed berries.

The last tray was filled with whole frozen strawberries from our plants.

The eggs weighed about 30 ounces before being cooked and once freeze dried they weigh only 5.6 ounces.

The eggs shared a tray with the alfredo as well.

The whole tray of strawberries ended up less than 3 ounces when finished.

After that batch was done the next round of trays got loaded in. They held avocado, apples, and pineapple.

We have now found that the apples need to be laid on their sides and not on the peel. The more surface contact there is between the food item and the stainless steel trays the better the process works. Some of the apples stood on their peels still were a bit soft after 33 hours in the machine. Just apples laid on the sides finished in 21 hours.

The avocado is likely not a super long term storage item with the amount of oils in it but we will see. The pineapple is truly astounding and delicious. It has a cool crunch to it and then it kinda of melts in the mouth.

Once the load finished yesterday I defrosted then pulled the rack out to clean it and the inside of the machine. I also changed the oil, filtered it, and then pulled my logs from the controller.

14 batches have been run with 2 of them being tests/cleaning runs. Since December 3rd we have had the machine running for 461 hours with the vacuum pump running for 332 of those hours.

Today I am going to get the next load in which is a tray of avocado, tray of mixed berries, one of rice and chicken leftovers from last night, then I have to fill the other 2 trays. Likely strawberries in one and maybe I will make a big batch of plain pasta for the last tray.

It is snowing today and we are expecting up to 6 inches with 2 already on the ground. I am going to get the snow blower running and run it around the farm to clear it.