Freeze Dryer Batches 17 and 18

I am now posting all of this to the new Freeze Dried Foods community so I can keep it a bit more easily located. Hopefully others will take the plunge and purchase their own so we can get this community going. For now I am likely to be the only one posting to it but it will be the easiest place to find the history of what I am doing.

In the morning the machine shut off when the cycle finally completed after 45 hours, which is a bit longer than I had expected. This batch is for our friend for their summer camping meals. They have a family of six and it cost a fortune to buy freeze dried meals for even one day let alone more. When I opened the door I found the dairy free marshmallows had expanded A LOT. So much so that I had a hard time getting the tray out of the rack. I had not expected that for sure.

The chicken and beef came out perfectly dried and still about the same sized.

The white rice does shrink a bit in the process but the spanish rice did not. The spaghetti does contract some but hers seemed to do so less than ours. Could have been the depth of it in the tray.

Mid day she came by with the kids and she got all the 4 trays sorted out into mylar bags and sealed half of them. She figured that she had enough meals made so far for 3 nights of dinners and 2 days of lunches. With her she brought items to put in for a second run.

4 more trays were filled with a variety. Apple slices and more marshmallows (properly spaced for expansion) on one.

Skittles and marshmallows on the next (again properly spaced for expansion).

This tray is the funky one and I m very curious to see what comes from it. The front is obviously big marshmallows but the back is an attempt at freeze drying teriyaki cubes for their meals. The hard part was that the stuff started melting the moment it came out of the freezer. I've figured out the best way to do it now after seeing the problems I had with this.

The best way is to set the machine to pre-freeze so it is already below 30F then I can take the frozen fluids from the deep freeze, put them on a cold tray and then into the already freezing machine. This will make it so the fluids don't begin to melt and loose their form.

The last of her 4 trays has a couple of soups that were leftover dinners. She froze them in trays which ended up a bit thick though the tray did slide into the rack without the food touching the heater. This is the heaviest and thickest tray I have done so far and am anxious to see how it comes out.

With one tray left to fill she had run out of things so I grabbed a bag of bacon bits from our freezer and filled the last tray for us. I'm expecting them to come out a bit like Bacos or other type of dried bacon nits.

The process is almost done as of this writing with 18 hours completed and a couple more left in the final dry. As for the next batch I am still deciding what will go in. It's become a challenge for me to come up with stuff to fill the trays and I am digging into the deep freezes a lot. I'd like to freeze dry enough food to be able to empty one of our many freezers.