The Coop Ep. #09: Freeze-Drying: The “Easy Button” for Home Food Preservation w/ Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas:

It’s just one of those things that makes life so much easier. Your favorite recipes are going to go into the freeze jar. I have Rehydrated chocolate birthday cake with frosting on it to be an amazing, almost like fresh consistency. Bacon freeze dried, oh out of this world Delicious.

Introduction:

We believe food looks and tastes better when it comes from a mason jar and that every home should have a well used cast iron skillet. We believe in starting where you are in being a good steward, and that homesteading is a mindset. First, we believe that our great grandmothers were right about almost everything and that the best conversations happen around the Coop

Anna Sakawsky:

All right. Hello everybody, and welcome to episode number nine of the Coop. So if you’re new here, this is where once a month we sit down with some of the homesteaders and writers who contribute to Homestead Living Magazine. The folks that who are truly at the forefront of the modern home setting movement. It’s always such a pleasure to learn from their wisdom and experience. So if you’re just joining us for the first time, I’m Anna Sikowski and I’m the editor in chief of Homestead Living Magazine. And today I am so excited to be joined by Carolyn Thomas from Homestead Family. So many of you probably know Carolyn already. She and her husband Josh, along with their 11 children live on a 40 acre homestead in North Idaho where they grow and raise most of their own food right in their own backyard. Among many other things.

Carolyn spends her days homeschooling, preserving food and teaching homesteading skills to others through her blog and her YouTube channel, both under the name of home setting family, as well as through her Pantry chat podcast. But importantly, she’s also the author of Freeze Drying the Harvest, the book that I hold in my hand right here, published by Homestead Living, and this is fast becoming the Go-to guide for Home Freeze drying, and she’s also a regular contributor to the magazine. So she writes for us quarterly and she writes on everything from gardening and preserving to herbal medicine and home management. She’s truly a wealth of knowledge on all things modern home setting. So I’m so excited to have her here with me today. We’re going to be talking all about freeze drying, and it’s the perfect time of year to be doing that. I was just saying before we started here, I’ve got my freeze dryer running constantly in the background right now, and as the harvest comes in, it’s a really, really fantastic way to preserve everything and it really is like hitting the easy button.

It’s so easy to put up everything that’s coming in at this time of year. So we are going to talk all about Carolyn’s own freeze drying journey and how she was actually converted from a skeptic to a believer why freeze drying is worth the investment for homesteaders and families. The seven simple steps to freeze drying, how you can preserve everything from fresh fruit and vegetables to meat, eggs, dairy, and even full meals, tips for choosing the right freeze dryer and avoiding common mistakes and more. Plus, you’ll get the chance to ask questions as we go, and at the end we’ll have a little bit of a q and a session. So again, if you’re just joining us for the first time here today, we’ll start with kind of an interview format where I’ll speak with Carolyn and we’ll kind of go through some of the basics and then we’ll kind open things up to ask some questions at the end.

But if you do have questions as you go, please feel free to pop them in the chat there and we’ll answer probably a few as we go and any of the other ones, we’ll save to the end and we’ll try to get to as many as possible. So if things come up, please just go ahead. Don’t feel like you have to wait till the end, go ahead and pop them in the comments there. Before we get into it, I just want to take a moment to thank today’s sponsor. So today’s episode of the Coop is brought to you in part by Plain Values Magazine and their brand new Plain Values podcast, so hosted by Plain Values publisher Marlon Miller. The podcast features heartfelt conversations with people who have stories, wisdom and advice we can all learn from, whether it’s about growing your own food, building, strong families, or living with intention.

The Plain Values podcast is quickly becoming one of the most inspiring shows in the podcast world. So you can head over to plain values.com/podcast to listen and subscribe for free. Again, that is plain values.com/podcast. Alright, so let’s get into it. So before I bring Carolyn on, I can see we’ve got a pretty active chat right now. I would love to know who here already has a freeze dryer, and if you don’t, you can pop that in as well. Maybe if you are thinking about getting one or have looked at them before, or maybe if you’re just brand new to this, let me know kind of where you are at on the freeze drying journey.

I have a harvest, right? Yes, I have one. Love mine. I’ve had a freezer for approximately three years, have one small. Okay, right on. So it sounds like a lot of people, oh, Mary says hers will be delivered next week. Oh, so exciting. Looking to buy one in the next six months. Awesome. Have a medium. Okay, perfect. Okay, so few, not yet few that are looking to get one, but a lot of people here actually have a freezer dryer already, so yes, and I’m totally obsessed. I hear you. I am obsessed with mine as well. Perfect. Okay, well this is going to be really exciting. So thank you so much for joining us here today. Carolyn, welcome to the show.

Carolyn Thomas:

Hello, it’s great to be here.

Anna Sakawsky:

Hi, thank you so much for taking time to be with us. So I’m really excited for you to share your story with freeze drying because it actually is kind of similar to how I began and you were one of the influences in my life that kind of prompted me to finally dive in and get the freeze dryer. At first, I kind of thought, what’s the big deal about this too? I actually didn’t really know what the difference was between freeze drying and just dehydrating and I have a dehydrator and that works well. But then I heard you start talking about it and how amazing it was and what a game changer it’s been for you and your family. So let’s start right at the beginning. Tell me about how you first got started with freeze drying.

Carolyn Thomas:

I think maybe even before I got started with freeze drying, I have been teaching people about practical food preservation for a long time now, and so when I first heard about freeze drying, my gimmick red flags went off. I was like, oh my goodness. Somebody just really came up with a product they thought they could market to us suckers who were slaving away at the kitchen. And I just really thought that this was just a gimmick.

And so I actually had a lot of baggage to work through before I ever even got to the part of trying out freeze drying. I was just so sure. I felt like, wow, as humans, we’ve been preserving food for thousands of years and we haven’t needed some high tech machine that had computer components to it or anything like that. So I was a skeptic. I was beyond skeptical. I was a hundred percent convinced that we did not need this thing. And so what actually happened was that Harvest Wright reached out to us and said, we’d love to give you a machine if you would make some honest review videos about it. And I actually went right back to ’em and I said, well, I’m not going to say nice things about your machine just because you give me a machine. I just want to make sure you’re giving this to us in full transparency here.

And they were like, just use it. Just try it. Just use it and just make honest videos. That’s the only thing we’re asking. I was like, okay, because what I really felt like was, I really felt like this was my moment to tell people you don’t need a fancy machine in order to do this. And I thought I was going to start using it and be like, this thing doesn’t do anything that I can’t do in the kitchen without it. The story goes, it took me about a month and a half to get the thing hooked up when it came. So it was like the beginning of January. So the middle of winter when it finally got to us, and I did not realize that because we had gotten a large machine, we actually needed an electrician to show up and to make some changes. If you get a smaller a medium machine, usually it’s just going to plug in no problem. But when you get into a large or extra large, you have to have a few changes made

And so there goes another month and a half by the time you actually get the electrician to the house to do these things. And so by the time I get it set up, it is just the absolute dead of winter. We’re here in north Idaho, it’s gorgeous out here, right down, but let me tell you, February is not the time you’re going to find anything to freeze dry out of your garden. And so I kind of looked around, I was like, oh, what am I going to do? And the first thing I found was some onions that were starting to go soft in my storage area and I knew that I needed to do something with them. Honestly, I was just going to chop ’em and dehydrate ’em probably and make onion powder or something like that. But I thought, ah, I’ll give it a try.

I knew really nothing about freeze drying at this point. I had not done any research, I didn’t like it. I didn’t think it was going to be a thing, so I put no energy into it. And so I just took the onions, I just ran ’em through my food processor, diced them, dumped them on a tray, slid ’em in and freeze dried. And when I got them out, I put ’em in just a jar, no special ceiling or anything, and I just put ’em in the kitchen and all of a sudden we were all using onions in the kitchen. We were going through those things so fast. My kids were cooking with onions. Everything tasted great. They were so easy to use that it was like we were just eating tons of onions, which of course is a plus because they’re good for you. And they were something that was going to go bad in my storage.

And I thought, okay, what are the chances? I just happened to accidentally pick the one thing that’s super useful, freeze dried. Even then I was not going to be sold. I was still a skeptic. And so the next thing that happened was Josh and I had purchased, I think it was 80 laying hens, and they all started laying right there at the same time. It’s very late winter, so they’re coming into the point of lay right at the egg flush. And so I kid you not, we’re starting to bring in 75 eggs a day, and even for our large family, 75 eggs a day is overwhelming. It’s like, what were we thinking? I’m not exactly sure what we were going to do with all the eggs. Eggs. And so I go, well, let’s try the freeze dryer. And so I would just crack about 18 eggs into a big measuring cup, blend them up really fast with my immersion blender, dump ’em on a freeze dryer tray and stick ’em in.

And when I pulled them out, I had this egg powder that I could rehydrate super easily, and I did a blind test. I didn’t let anybody know. I made scrambled eggs out of fresh eggs and out of these freeze dried eggs and people couldn’t tell the difference between eating the fresh eggs that had been scrambled and cooked and these freeze dried eggs that then I rehydrated and cooked. And that for me was when the light bulb really went off and I was like, oh, I can store these for 20 years for the moments when I don’t have fresh eggs and nobody can tell the difference. It was like, okay, that’s a game changer. And then it went even a step further where then the raspberries came in. That was the next real big thing. So I’m not joking. Almost every day, as soon as I get an empty freeze dryer, we’re sticking new trays of eggs in.

We freeze dried dozens of half gallon jars of eggs, probably even more than that. It was so many. But then the raspberries hit and we have about 80 raspberry plants. We get many, many gallons of raspberries every year. The challenge that I find with raspberries is either I’m sticking them in the freezer, which I don’t know about you, but on our homestead freezer space is a premium. You better be something really important to go into the freezer. It’s going to be filled completely with meat by the end of the season. So I either take up space in the freezer or really to get a decent product, you have to add a bunch of sugar. You’re just not going to get a great product for anything canned, even anything dehydrated unless you’re adding some sugar to it when it comes to raspberries. And so I thought, okay, well let me try this. So I go out, the kids go out, we pick a whole bucket of raspberries, we bring them in, literally I dump them straight onto the freeze dryer trays, pick through a little bit, take out any little leaves or stems or anything. I get stick it in the machine and push go,

And I’m like, and that’s it. And then I pull these raspberries out and they are like little pops of summer that are just like, they’re so concentrated because you’ve pulled all the water out, but they’re still fresh unlike something that’s been dehydrated, which has that heat cooked flavor to it. These are absolutely raw, fresh raspberries with so much flavor. And it was at that point that I was like, wait, I don’t want to have to decide between whether I can freeze dry eggs or raspberries. So that’s when I turned around and I went back and I actually bought a second freeze dryer. I was like, okay, not only is this thing awesome, but I need more space. So we now have three freeze dryers. We have two larges and an extra large. It’s harvest season right now, which incidentally is why I am sitting outside is because the kitchen is so filled with much food preservation. You be able to hear me if I was inside the hum.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, I was going to say I thought mine was loud. I can’t imagine three freeze dryers. I’ll go in at one

Carolyn Thomas:

Three freeze dryers running constantly. They actually, you can’t hear them up in the main part of the house. We have ’em down in the basement, so they work really well. But it’s just one of those things that makes life so much easier. And I have to tell you, there are things that are out of this world. Amazing tomatoes for me are a game changer. I will never can another tomato. I mean maybe I shouldn’t say never, but in my planning, I will not do another tomato in the canner. And the reason why, if you think about what it takes to can a tomato, you get your tomatoes in, you have to core them, take up the little stem section, you have to peel them. So that means you’re getting a pot up to boiling water, you’re putting a little X through the skin, you’re dropping ’em into the boiling water, you’re cooling them in ice water. Then you’re peeling. This is all before you ever even get the canner out.

So this is step and step and step and I would literally spend weeks of my life every summer canning tomatoes. Now what I do, I take my tomatoes skin on and everything. They’re straight out of the garden. They’re nice and clean. I don’t even wash ’em. I don’t even take little cos out. I run ’em through the ER on my food processor. I have a little dicer kit that just goes chop, chop, chop chop and gives me nice little dices. If you don’t have one of those, find one of them. Whether you freeze dry or not, it’ll be your best friend in the kitchen during food preservation season. And then I take them and I dump ’em on a tray and I put ’em in the freezer. I freeze ’em first because I freeze everything at this point pretty much before I put it in the freeze dryer.

I will talk about that I’m sure today. But when I pull it out, I have these little chunks of tomato, and with that exact same diced tomato, I can either rehydrate, diced tomato or I can powder them up just a little bit, just crunch ’em around with the back end of a wooden spoon and I could make tomato paste, I can make tomato sauce, I can make tomato juice. I can do any of those. It just depends on how much water I add to it. So no boiling on the stove for hours, no evaporating off all that liquid, nothing like that. So there are these things that are game changers like tomatoes. For me, there are things that aren’t awesome, and I am going to be totally honest. There are things that I’m still like, yeah, I think I’m going to can this or things that you need to know the tricks for to make them awesome. Green beans are a great example of that. So as I started diving into freeze drying more and learning all of these great things, what I realized is that I was really lucky to have great results with the first few things that I did, but there was a lot that I didn’t know,

And there were a lot of little nuances to freeze drying that I had to learn. When I got to the next winter and I started using those freeze dried eggs, I had enough fresh eggs that I wasn’t using anything freeze dried, but I started using them in earnest and replacing my chicken eggs with these freeze dried eggs, I found that I had lost over 50% of those original dozens and dozens of jars because I made some very basic mistakes, but I didn’t know about it. Right. Okay. And so it was experiences like that that really drove me to start researching and researching and learning and testing and trialing all the different things and all the different angles to make sure that my freeze dried food was safe, it was delicious, and then it turned out great every time I did it. Otherwise, if you’re not going to eat it at the end of the day because it’s not great, then it’s not worth

Anna Sakawsky:

It. Right? Or if you’re losing half your harvest, I mean you really have become the expert on it. And I was just saying before we went live here that I truly do reference your book all the time now because I’m new to freeze drying still. We got about a year ago, but I really just started using it in earnest this summer. And the great thing about the way you’ve written this, you’ve got a whole first part. One is all about kind of the basics of freeze drying, but then part two is all just an alphabetical listing of all of the different foods. So I’ve got plums in there right now. My mom’s plum tree went crazy this year, and so it was really easy for me to just flip right to plums. Where’s plums somewhere right here? And you’ve got it all outlined in here, how to do it if they need any kind of pre-treatment, if you need to peel them or not, how much to do in each different size, freeze drawing train.

I was saying it’s actually easier for me to actually pick up this book and flip to that page than to try to research that and find that specific item online. So thank you for doing the trial and error and making some of the mistakes so that hopefully we don’t have to, and we’re going to get into that in just a minute too. We’ll talk about what are some of the common mistakes and how people can avoid them. And honestly, I have so many questions, so many things came up for me as you were talking about that, but I’ll kind of save it to the end as well because I know other people already have questions here. I haven’t done any tomatoes yet, and it’s really good just because I was on the fence. We’ve just been throwing ’em all in the freezer right now because that’s what we normally do and then process them later. But that sounds so easy, and especially not having to peel ’em. And so, okay, that’s going to be next up for me. One of the cool things, our first thing that we, I’ve been hesitant to try onions yet. I really want to, it’s actually on the top of my list because of your story, but I’ve been worried about having to take the time to clean out the freezer after because I don’t want that onion smell permeating everything is that. It’s

Carolyn Thomas:

Really not that bad. My big thing is just don’t use the silicone mats on your trays for that. That

Anna Sakawsky:

Will, that’ll absorb

Carolyn Thomas:

It. Absorb. So either go with nothing and go straight on the stainless steel or use some parchment paper for

Anna Sakawsky:

It. Okay. That’s a good tip.

Carolyn Thomas:

And then really the only place you’ll probably have to clean is the silicone seal on the door and that just pops off. It’s so easy to pop off, but the trick is that if you do feel like there’s a lingering smell, you just do a batch or two of something that you like onions combined with.

Anna Sakawsky:

So

Carolyn Thomas:

Plan on following onions up with your tomatoes that’s going to be off, something like that. It just takes a little time to just get all the residual smell out

Anna Sakawsky:

Sometimes. Yeah, we’ve started with mostly fruits. Actually, the first thing that I did was bananas, which I found really cool because bananas are one that you really can’t preserve mean you can freeze them and add them to smoothies or whatever, but they don’t lend themselves to canning or fermenting or really even dehydrating, right? I’ve found when you dehydrate bananas at home, you don’t get that crispy banana chip you get in the store. It’s kind of chewy and it’s not my favorite, but my son, I have a toddler and he loves bananas, and sometimes we run out and like you were saying, it’s not even just about preservation for preservation sake sometimes or long-term prepping or anything. Sometimes it’s just for convenience and having those on hands for when we run out of bananas and I have a quick fix has been really awesome, and that fresh, we just did some peaches and I was blown away by the flavor because I’m used to either canning them or preserving them in some other way where they taste they’re good, but they taste a little bit cooked, and these peaches genuinely taste like eating a raw peach.

So yeah, I’m quickly becoming a convert as well.

Carolyn Thomas:

Well, we made the mistake one year of freeze drying peach pie filling. We had actually made peach pie filling and we freezed dried that it was gone before it ever hit the shelf. Okay. It was a good mistake. Almost all of our mistakes are really good mistakes, like the free straight ice cream. I don’t think it ever even saw the inside of a Mylar bag. It was just like, yeah, we’re never making this again because we just ate it right there. It was so good. Yeah, totally. There are some that are just save it for those fun when you have all the friends over dinner party and then you’re like, I can’t eat that much sugar. That’s not good for me.

Anna Sakawsky:

No kidding. Okay, so on that topic of freeze dried ice cream, that just brings me to my next question because I remember hearing about this and I’m like, I just wasn’t computing in my head because I had always equated freeze drying to dehydrated. I’m like, how do you freeze dry ice cream? Wouldn’t that? So what is the process? Can you walk me through the of freeze drying? How does it work?

Carolyn Thomas:

So to put this into really basic understanding, if you think about the boiling temperature of water when you go up in elevation, that boiling temperature, that temperature drops, right? This is if any of you guys have studied any food preservation, any jelly making or anything, you’re really acquainted with this. This is why we have to change our time when we’re water bath canning, if we’re up higher in elevation, or if you have to change your pressure and pressure canning or you need to change the temperature of your jelly making because of where water boils. So now imagine that we take that to the extreme. All of that, of course is because that’s the evaporation point. So that’s when the water starts to evaporate is at that different temperature. So you’ve got or not starts to evaporate, but that’s where all of a sudden you have this place where that liquid turns instantly into vapor, right?

So if we take that to the extreme, and let’s say we go to the elevation of the moon and all of a sudden we’re way in outer space, that point where that water becomes a vapor drops all the way down to when it’s in an ice state. So this is the science of sublimation. So this is where you go from ice crystal directly to a vapor without passing through a liquid phase, and this is a really key component to freeze drying because what you’re doing in freeze drying is you’re taking your food and you’re dropping this to an extremely cold temperature. So think we’re talking negative 30, negative 40 degrees, and then that vacuum pump kicks on, and essentially what you’ve done is that the vacuum pump drops the pressure, the atmospheric pressure in that machine to be kind of the equivalent of you’re out in the moon on the moon. So now we have this frozen food and all of the water inside this really frozen food has just turned to ice crystals, but now we’re vaporizing those ice crystals. We’re going straight from ice into a vapor because we’ve just created that circumstance where the environment where we have that extreme cold and we have that atmospheric pressure like you’re at the elevation of the moon,

So all of a sudden it’s just going poof. So your ice is now gotten sucked out, so your water is getting sucked out, but it’s never been at a liquid state at that point during that process. So when you’re dehydrating, it’s at a liquid state and it almost cooks out even if the cooking is just a low temperature for a long time and that’s why you picture a strawberry that’s been dehydrated or an apple slice that’s been dehydrated, it changes form. It looks shriveled, it’s bendable, it’s pliable. That’s because you’ve collapsed the entire cellular structure of that produce that apple during this process where we’re cooking out the extra moisture

When you’re freeze drying, that does not happen. It stays in its exact same cellular structure and the liquid is just being vaporized, which is why you end up with something that’s kind of the texture most of the time of styrofoam, right? That’s not a nice word you think about when you think about food. You don’t want your food to be styrofoam, but that’s essentially the texture that you end up with most free dried food because it has stayed in its same structure and we vaporized all the liquid out of it at that point, once you get the liquid pretty much completely gone from your food, that makes it shelf stable. That’s because bacteria, yeast, all those things can’t operate in a liquid list environment. They have to have some amount of liquid in order to be able to, even your enzymes need some amount of liquid to be able to operate. So it puts your food in a state of suspended animation. So it’s a very different process than say, dehydrating, where you’re adding that heat that even if it’s very gentle heat, you’re still adding heat and you’re going from liquid and evaporating it off from a liquid state.

Anna Sakawsky:

That makes so much more sense just the way you explained about collapsing the cellular structure, and that’s why our dehydrated food gets smaller. That’s the one downside I would say maybe two for the freeze dried food is that it actually stays the same size and shape as when you put it in. So as far as the space,

Carolyn Thomas:

Unless you powder it, yes,

Anna Sakawsky:

Unless you powder it. But as far as the storage space, that’s the one thing I’m like, oh wow, I had eight quarts of peaches going in. I got eight quartz coming out where I’m so used to, whether you’re cooking something down to Canada or dehydrating it, it always shrinks, right? Actually sometimes it shrinks too much. So you’re like, is that it? Like three jars and all that, but this, you actually get what you put in. Okay, so let’s now talk a little bit about, because you did mention this is why it’s shelf stable because there’s no moisture, obviously there’s other types of food preservation. How does this stack up in terms of a form of food preservation versus some of the other popular types like canning, fermenting, dehydrating, as far as it being shelf stable? How does it compare?

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah, so I have to preface that everything that I’m saying about it being shelf stable is really dependent on your proficiency at making sure that it’s all the way dry and that it’s properly packaged. Because freeze dried food will go from shelf stable to not shelf stable in about 30 seconds in the wrong environment. It just has to be packaged properly. It has to be all the way dry when you package it. If it is properly packaged, then what you end up with a food that is actually really shelf stable nutrient wise for seriously, it’s like 20 years. This is one of those places. I wondered when I got into it, I was like, is this just marketing? You see all this stuff like your food lasts for 20 years, 25 years. The really cool thing about freeze drying is we have a long history of scientific knowledge about freeze drying because of the military. So because the military has used freeze dried foods in their res for so long, there’s a lot of scientific literature about what it does. How long does it hold on to nutrition, what changes about it, the nutrients when it’s freeze dried? And so we actually have a lot of literature and I dove into all the studies and actually read them and looked at them all, and I mean, it’s true. It holds it for an extremely long period of time. So

Introduction:

Longer than

Carolyn Thomas:

When talk about 20 years, when they talk about 20 years, that’s just where you start to get some food loss. So some foods, it’s probably way way longer than that,

Anna Sakawsky:

Right? Yeah. So I mean that’s considerably longer than I’d say probably the next longest. Well, probably, what would you say canning or dehydrating would probably be the next longest shelf stable food a year or two maybe kind of thing.

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah. Well, okay, so the technical answer, if you go read the preservation technical manuals, it’s going to say that your canned food lasts for kind of max two years. The reality is is it stays safe as long as you have a good seal. I’ve talked to people who have a good seal 30 years later. What it’s not talking about is if it’s nutrient dense, and that’s the big difference is we have to look at the difference between safety and nutrient density. So your canned foods, they last, as long as you have a good seal, it’s only going to sit day nutrient dense. I mean, honestly, it’s a slow decline as soon as you put it on your shelf, but they say pretty nutrient dense for about a year,

Introduction:

Right?

Carolyn Thomas:

Okay. Same thing pretty much with dehydrated foods, they’ll last as long as they stay in dehydrated shape and are stored well, but you get an immediate decline of nutrient density. So you’re talking maybe six months, maybe a year, six months to a year for most dehydrated food for the high levels. To me, fermenting is the one food preservation method that you could possibly use that would actually increase your nutrient value, but that’s only until a certain point, and then the acidity actually starts to kill off the bacteria that’s in your fermented foods, and even that starts to lose its nutrient value,

Anna Sakawsky:

Right?

Carolyn Thomas:

So there’s just really nothing that’s even close as far as if you’re talking long term, if you’re talking short term, you’re talking about a year, something like that. Your fermented foods are going to be the second best thing for nutrient density,

Anna Sakawsky:

For nutrient density. But of course, yeah, they’re not going to last anywhere near as long. I know because I have a jar of jar fermented jarre in the fridge that from last year, I’m like, we really got to eat this. It’s getting a little tangy. Yeah, and then again, those need that kind of cold storage too, whether you have a root cellar or a fridge for longer term storage, I guess, right?

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah. I mean they didn’t use to. It’s

Anna Sakawsky:

True, and they made it, although most people probably had some sort of a root seller somewhere, they would keep it a little not on your counter in the kitchen. Whereas that’s where a lot of my things end up because a lack of,

Carolyn Thomas:

You’re definitely going to get a better product

Anna Sakawsky:

For longer

Carolyn Thomas:

If you have it cold.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay. Alright. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about what can and cannot be freeze dried. This is what is really cool I find about freeze drying versus some of the other forms of food preservation is you can preserve certain things that you just can’t through other methods, but there are certain things that you shouldn’t freeze dry or that just don’t lend themselves to freeze drink. So let’s talk first about what can be freeze dried and then we’ll talk about what you shouldn’t.

Carolyn Thomas:

Okay. What can be freeze dried? Let’s see. I know that I’m clipping through my book to say I have a concise list here somewhere just so I don’t miss the basics. Obviously, I’m trying to think if there’s all fruits, all vegetables, but there’s a lot of things outside of that too. Oh, meats. Pretty much all meats, whole meals, side dishes, pretty much desserts, eggs, milk, all sorts of dairy fermented foods. Fermented foods are great. Whether we’re talking something like your sourdough starter or we’re talking about a sauerkraut like a vegetable ferment or even a dairy ferment would be great too

Anna Sakawsky:

All the time. Does preserve the live cultures though

Carolyn Thomas:

Then? It does. It does. And they stay highly active for, I’ve found about a year after about a year, they start to decline a little bit, but bacteria actually will reanimate almost instantly. This is amazing. If you’re like me and you have a tendency to kill your sourdough starter constantly, and even if you dehydrated some as a backup, it takes it a while to get up and running again with your freeze dried sourdough starter backup. It’s one feeding and it’s ready to go. It’s like instant S bubbling, that’s foaming. It’s amazing. Have you ever done

Anna Sakawsky:

Kefi grains or anything like that or SCEs or,

Carolyn Thomas:

I am trying to think if I’ve done any of those. I do yogurt all the time. I use that as a lot and buttermilk. I use that as starter cultures for cheeses and all sorts of things, so I’ve done my own of those. I think we did SCOBYs, like a kombucha scoby one time, but it all just comes right back. The bacteria can survive just fine. That’s really cool. I actually

Anna Sakawsky:

Dumped my kefi down the toilet the other day thinking it was old yogurt. I’m like, I’m not going to, I salvaged a few grains and I was able to bring it back, but I dumped a whole bunch before I realized that’s what I was dumping out. I’m like, oh no. So

Carolyn Thomas:

Have back system for context, tell you exactly why you put it down the toilet. It’s because that’s so good for your septic system, right? Of course. Yeah. The only reason anybody would dump their food down

Anna Sakawsky:

The toilets. So funny. Funny you said that because I actually thought about that and I’m like, well, maybe there’s some benefit. Maybe it’s cleaning that out and it’s good for that too. Absolutely.

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah. But that would totally work to have that freeze dried.

Anna Sakawsky:

Cool. Okay, that’s great. Okay, so

Carolyn Thomas:

Now I do have to say anything fermented. You do have to make one change on your machine before you run it. The same thing with any herbal medicine with heat sensitive properties, because there’s another one you can freeze dry your medicinal herbs and a lot of your medicinal remedies, you can freeze dry, but you do need to hit the customized button on your machine and drop the max temperature down to 95 degrees. You don’t want it to overheat your heat sensitive things. Same things with your probiotic rich foods. You don’t want to kill off your bacteria by heat,

Introduction:

Which

Carolyn Thomas:

You will do in the freeze drying process. So you just drop that temperature down. It’s just a setting on your machine. The only reason everything isn’t set for that is because then it takes a little bit longer to freeze dry, so it just slows your machine process down a little bit.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, perfect. Okay. Before we move on, let’s just quickly go over the list of things that can’t freeze dry,

Carolyn Thomas:

Things that we can’t freeze dry. Pretty much it comes down to things that are really fatty. That is kind of your biggest thing, is that fat does not actually have moisture in it. It doesn’t have water in it. So when you try to do something like either dehydrate it or freeze dry it, it doesn’t change. It just kind of stays like what it, but you put it through these temperature extremes and what does happen to fat is it does go rancid. So anything that’s high fat’s not going to store for you for 20 years, and I will be clear, you can still freeze dry some high fat items like bacon, freeze dried, oh, out of this world delicious. You have to keep it in the freezer. Okay. You’re not going to put it on your shelf because it’ll go

Anna Sakawsky:

Rampant, it’ll be crispy and

Carolyn Thomas:

It’s so good on a car trip. You want to talk about the alternative to jerky?

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, it just

Carolyn Thomas:

Is amazing. So good, but it’s really high fat now. You definitely can’t stick a stick of butter into your freeze dry and freeze dry it. That just makes a disaster, makes a mess. It’s gross and you’ll be cleaning your machine for a long

Anna Sakawsky:

Time, so just don’t do that. Cheeses though, and high fat dairy, you said milk cheese, great, but what about cream?

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah, you can actually freeze dry all those things. You just have to realize that you’re not talking 20 years for storage. You may be talking more like two years for storage for something like cream. So that’s actually not a problem. Cheese freezed dry is great, especially your hard cheese grated. It’s so good.

Anna Sakawsky:

It’s really great. But like a cheddar, you could do still, right?

Carolyn Thomas:

Absolutely. The other things you want to be aware of are things like nut butters because they’re so high fat, they just don’t freeze dry properly. The other thing you do need to watch out for things that are extremely high sugar most of the time. So things like your homemade fruit preserves, they just don’t freeze dry well. If they’re full sugar, they don’t do good in the freeze dryer. Other things like pure alcohol, they kind of figure it’s hard on your machine, inner workings, pure vinegar really hard on the inner workings of your machine. It doesn’t mean you can never freeze dry anything with vinegar in it, but just doing load after load of pure vinegar, you’re probably going to corrode something that you didn’t mean to corrode. Those are kind of the big hot topic things. A lot of chocolate things. Same reason it’s really, really high fat and sugar. Usually it’s not going to freeze dry properly

Anna Sakawsky:

And I think was honey one as well. I feel like I’ve read that before. Yeah,

Carolyn Thomas:

Anything in that

Anna Sakawsky:

Pure high sugar, that kind of sticky, sugary, okay. Yeah,

Carolyn Thomas:

Maple syrup, you don’t want to deal with that.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, that’s good to know. I have dehydrated maple sugar or maple syrup before and made maple sugar, but that’s in a dehydrated. Yes. This is a different process. It’s a different, okay, got it. Okay. What’s been your favorite thing so far? Because you’ve done all sort, you’ve started with ingredients, but you’ve also done meals, you’ve done all sorts of stuff. You’ve done the ice cream. I know you said you didn’t even make it to the bag. What are maybe your top three favorite things that you’ve,

Carolyn Thomas:

I think honestly this breaks into so many different categories. Is it the thing that I love to eat the most when it comes out, or is it the thing that I’m the most excited about? It saves me so much time. I think the freeze dried chicken pot pie fillings are a family favorite because we will actually store those in little half pint sized jars and then I separately freeze dry little rounds of baked pie topping biscuit. Okay. You could do biscuit. We just do pie dough that I roll out in a little circle, just the size of the jar tops and then we just put it in it. So literally what you do is you’ve got this jar, single served jar of chicken pot pie that just sits on your shelf as long as you want it there until you use it. So the trick is don’t use ’em too fast because they’re so good, but when you need a meal to go, you can just grab one of those, pour a little boiling water into it. I just pick up the little biscuit top, pour the boiling water in, put the little biscuit top back down, put the lid back on and it rehydrates in about three to five minutes per perfectly, and then the little steam that comes off rehydrates the biscuit top perfectly, and you have within easily five minutes, you have complete homemade out of this world. Delicious tastes completely fresh. It just came out of the oven chicken pot pie. Very cool. And it’s ready to go. So it’s things like that that my family just absolutely, absolutely loves.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, and being able to do the biscuit or the pie topper as well, so you can freeze dry that sort of thing too. I always wonder about that. You hear about you freeze dry, people who freeze dry pizza and that sort of thing. Does that get mushy though when it gets rehydrated or,

Carolyn Thomas:

So the question, not all things rehydrate perfectly right now. When you freeze dry slices of pizza, it makes the best freeze dried, not rehydrated thing ever. It’s like crackers, but completely pizza flavored so good.

Anna Sakawsky:

But

Carolyn Thomas:

You do have to get into a few tricks if you want to rehydrate those really, really tricky things. There’s some things that are never just going to be crispy again. However, you can get into some of the fancier rehydration, which is like to stick a damp towel in a plastic bag overnight with your piece of pizza and it will rehydrate without being excessively soggy.

Anna Sakawsky:

Right, right. Oh wow. Okay. I’m going to have to get a little bit more adventurous.

Carolyn Thomas:

But for storage, a lot of the things that we find if I’m making backpacking meals or camping meals is that if you just cook up your bread part separately, whatever that is, if you’re thinking biscuits and gravy, you’re thinking chicken pot pie or maybe tortilla soup or something like that. You just add those in separately to your meal and that makes it really easy.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, one of the cool things too about doing the ready to eat meals is that you could do, for example, chicken noodle soup and you could make the noodles as well. Is that correct? And then freeze, whereas with canning, you don’t want to add the noodles till later and it’s no big deal to cook up some noodles. But if you want to just grab and go something or if you’re camping or somewhere where it’s not that easy to boil noodles from scratch, you can cook them. It’s like instant noodles and then you pour the hot water on and it’s ready

Carolyn Thomas:

To go. You have the teenager in the house that you’re like, you just need the easy meal. Male teenager especially is like, they’re not going to cook it and add noodles. They need dump the boiling water over it. But yeah, rice, any of those things becomes instant ,

Any of that because you precooked it and then you freeze dry it, and so it just becomes instant. Spaghetti is a favorite in our house, freeze dried spaghetti filled with meat and lots of veggies. .

Because you just take it, and one of the things that I find is so amazing about freeze drying is canning. You have to have specific

Freeze drying. You can literally take the leftovers from your dinner, put a tray into the freezer, put your leftovers in one section of the tray from tonight, and then maybe tomorrow night you have a different leftover. So you put another doll up of that leftover on the tray, you fill up your tray and you pop one of the tray lids on it, leave it in the freezer until you have all your trays filled up. You freeze dried that and you have probably 40 different In my freeze dryer, it’s about 40 different servings of individual meals that are just from your leftover little bits of ins and odds enough to feed one person but not the whole family type of leftovers.

Anna Sakawsky:

And

Carolyn Thomas:

Then you have this great selection of instant ready-made meals because you don’t have to cook specific things for your freeze dryer. Your favorite recipes are going to go into the freeze dryer. You may want to make ’em a little lower fat than normal just to make sure they last a long time on the shelf, but aside from that, they’re going to go in. Great. Yeah, I never even thought about that too. Lasagna, you guys, it’s amazing. Lasagna is perfect when it comes out. It tastes fresh when you freeze dried it and then you rehydrate it. If you want to keep it in slice form instead of casserole form, you need to not make it too thick to actually fit into the freeze dryer on the trays. That’s the big trick to it. But if you’ll make a lasagna casserole, it’s not even a big deal. It’s just perfect.

Anna Sakawsky:

That’s so awesome. You can probably see my wheels are turning right now what I can do, because I never even thought about that. I’m so used to, you’re right, doing a run of something specific, right? You need full trays of all this one thing. But yeah, because you can play with it a bit more and you don’t need to follow specific processing times for different things or certain recipes. You can kind of do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Okay. I’m going to get a more adventurous here. Okay, we’re going to move on to some more questions. The next thing we’re going to talk about is the seven steps to freeze drying. So walk us through the process, but before we do that, because we are coming up on the hour mark, well in about 10, 12 minutes, so I want to just take a little bit of time so that we’re not leaving everybody hanging at the end and go through a few questions. So the first one I’m going to go to is Sherry, who asked, is freeze drying a high energy user, something that I also was worried about and you mentioned having to get an electrician out for yours. How have you found that? Is your electricity bill higher because of running all the freeze dryers or is that negligible?

Carolyn Thomas:

Okay, well let me just start this by saying whose energy, let me ask a question because it saves me no joke. Weeks. I am not joking. Maybe you guys don’t preserve as much as I do. I have a large family, huge gardens. I am not joking that it saves me weeks and weeks out of my year every single year. So I always want to flip that around a little bit and say, what’s more valuable to you, your time or your electricity bill? Now that said, it was not nearly as expensive as I thought it was going to be. .

Now in the book, I actually do full charts on how much it costs and tell you how to figure out each load and how much it costs. It depends so much on the energy cost in your particular area, which is actually address. I didn’t know how much that varied across the country until I actually did this and found for each state what your energy costs are and everything. Idaho where I live is about a medium energy cost and for us, most of our loads cost in a large machine. So let me just, that’s five large trays that’s going to cost me under $5 to run all the way through. So yes, it does have a cost attached to it. Now what I found was really interesting, I don’t know if I can find it in the book quickly enough to chat about here, but I actually have a friend who is a mechanical engineer and I had him do all sorts of scenarios of trying to compare the energy that it would cost you to use your pressure canner for something versus your pressure or your dehydrator or just freezing something compared to freeze drying it. And what I found was surprising in that, yeah, there’s a chart in here. I can’t pull it up fast enough, but what I found is that it’s actually surprisingly not that much more expensive to freeze dry when we’re talking something like pressure canning. The larger the freeze dryer you get, the better that scenario is because the more efficient it is per pound.

If you’re really worried about your energy usage, get a larger machine because it is just way more efficient per pound of food and then you’re running larger batches, fewer larger batches rather than more smaller batches. And it’s incredibly, incredibly efficient machine wise to do it that way. When you get up to an extra large, it is phenomenally energy savings. It’s still more expensive than pressure canning something, but it’s not by as much as you’d think.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well,

Carolyn Thomas:

And I love it’s not that much more

Anna Sakawsky:

Love that you said whose energy, because you’re right. How was your time and energy worth too? I know I was up canning last night and my daughter got dropped off late from a show she went to with a friend and her mom said, are you canning? She goes, I used to can till three in the morning. And I said, I’ve been there and I don’t want to do that anymore. And you’re right. And this, it was like, I’m doing all the canning and here’s my four jars and here’s my three jars. And then this is like, here’s four trays of plums in. Don’t even have to think about it. I did it this morning. Every time I do put something in, I’m like, I doubled. My husband is the one that set it all up and I always forget. I’m like, I have to when we’re going to talk about this, just a sec, the seven steps. But he walks me through, okay, make sure you turn this. And then he is like, and just turn it on. I’m like, okay, now he’s like, it really, there’s got to be more to this. Right?

Carolyn Thomas:

Absolutely.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, so let’s see. There was another one that I wanted to go to here. We’re going to talk about this in a minute about choosing a freeze dryer. But let’s see, Mariana, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, had asked if you have any other experience with the machines other than a harvest. So I know that you use the harvest, right? That’s what I have. That’s probably the most popular well-known freeze dryer on the market, but there are other brands. What do you know about these other brands? How do they compare and have you ever used them?

Carolyn Thomas:

There are some other, we’ve got blue Alpine. There’s actually, I think at this point that I’ve seen maybe three other brands besides Harvest that are out there. And for each of them I have gotten to at least talk to a user. I have not used one of the other ones myself. My thing and my feeling on this is that at this point, the last that I had heard, harvest Wright has still sold like 95% of the home use freeze dryers out there in existence at this point. And I just love their depth of experience. I love that they’ve been doing this for so long. They know the problems, they know how to fix it, they know how to deal with all these issues, and they have a really long run of customer service there. Just to look back to, I have personally just to know, I have contacted them anonymously with, Hey, I’m having an issue with my machine. And they have been incredibly helpful to me. I’ve had great experiences with them. I know that I’m going to have a great experience if I tell ’em who I am because of course they want to keep me happy. They’re like, yeah, make sure you treat her well. So I specifically went in and I was like, total anonymous user. I’m having a problem. Here’s my issue. Can you help me? And they were incredibly helpful and nice. So my experience has been totally positive with them.

The really probably great thing that I can say is that I’ve only had to reach out to customer service once for them. I haven’t had problems with my machines. I’ve had one problem and it was pretty easy to fix. And that was a door alignment issue. I just had to get my door aligned. So that achieved vacuum just fine. And once I did that, that was a little screwed in. So yeah,

Anna Sakawsky:

Harvest

Carolyn Thomas:

Rates. As far as other machines, I have not used them. I’m not willing to spend that kind of money on a company that hasn’t been around very long.

Anna Sakawsky:

Right. And I just did a really brief look. So I haven’t researched apples for apples the same size versus the same size. But when I did a really brief chat research on different brands, it looked like they were all actually pretty similar in price. I thought, oh, maybe some of them are going to be a lot cheaper, but it didn’t look like, it looked like they were actually pretty comparable. So I mean, the harvest rate, it’s built really well. I actually got a refurbished model last year, so saved a few thousand. Now I’m in Canada, so that got made up when they charged me all the customs fees. This was pre tariff so too, so I don’t know. But I did if anybody’s on here from Canada, I saw them at Costco this year and when I was all excited about that with the Homestead living team, they were like, yeah, we’ve had them in Costco for a while. I’m like, well, we just got them in Canada, so if you are in Canada, and because that can be an extra prohibitive thing too, is getting across the border. I did see them at Costco earlier this year, so keep your eye peeled. Okay, one more question before we get back into it. Tony had asked, how do you clean the machine? We talked a little bit about this when I mentioned the onions and the smell, and he said he knows someone who accidentally left stuff in there and it got moldy is the machine salvageable

Carolyn Thomas:

And mold is a thing that can happen because obviously this is built to hold a vacuum so it doesn’t have great air circulation in there. So if you lock your machine down and it’s wet in there or it has food in there, then you will get mold. It is kind of a guaranteed thing. Cleaning it is very doable. You can definitely clean it the good news is you don’t regularly have to clean it because your food’s not regularly touching any surface, but the trays,

So as long as you don’t have some sort of a disaster in machine, which can happen, you can have food explode in the machine and there’s really, really easy fixes so that you never have that happen, but as long as you don’t have any sort of a mess, you don’t have to regularly clean it at all, which is really great news if you do have a mess and you do have to clean it, especially from something like mold, you’re getting in there with good old soap, dish soap and water. You’re cleaning it out, you’re scrubbing it out, you’re rinsing it, you’re doing, for me, it’s probably going to be a food grade, hydrogen peroxide, and then you’re going to do a couple extra bread runs afterwards, which those bread runs are just where you put a damp slices of bread on your trays and you freeze dry those. The bread is just acting as a sponge, a cheap sponge to hold a lot of liquid and then it’s flushing liquid through your machine system. There’s nothing magical about bread, but you do a bread run as your first run pretty much always on a machine. I’ve never seen a machine or heard of even a different brand of machine that doesn’t recommend to do a bread run first that just flushes everything out just like you’d rinse something before you used it in the kitchen or you’d wash it.

That’s all that’s doing. So you’re going to do that several times. That is a moment where I would soak your bread in vinegar as well as water, like a vinegar water so that you’re flushing that whole machine that’s gotten mold in it after you’ve cleaned it with a vinegar water to try and really flush it. But yeah, I have seen people completely save their machines that have been molded over and I’ve molded over once and it wasn’t there was food in there. It was because I locked it down and it got airtight when it was still damp.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, it is amazing. I left, there was a single pee left on one of the trays in my freezer or the peas, and I don’t even think I close it all the way because I’m used to our washing machine door. I always leave it a little bit open because of that same issue, but still it went moldy really quick and it just goes to show even a fully freeze dried pea. Well, we know just from running our air conditioner this summer, it draws out the moisture and we have a big gallon that it filters it into and it’s incredible how quickly that can fill up. We don’t notice how much moisture is actually in the air, but that makes a lot sense. Does the vinegar, I was going to ask about that because you hear that with washing machines, for example, sometimes that if you use it, it can void your warranty or something. Does harvest rate recommend cleaning with vinegar? Could that damage it in any way or?

Carolyn Thomas:

That’s a really good question, and that’s one of those things you’re going to check your user manual. They update those things all the time, so you’re going to want to make sure your specific machine that you’re paying attention to that, because you definitely don’t want to avoid a warranty or anything like that. So it’s a good thought there, Anna, for your machine though, the harvest, right? When I’ve talked to them, they’re like, vinegar is not going to hurt our machine. What are you going to do it? Awesome. You’re

Anna Sakawsky:

Putting food. They might have vinegar in it anyway, so that makes sense. Okay.

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah, it’s just one of those things like it’s good maintenance, I think just to keep that vinegar and that acidity lower. So don’t start a business freeze drying pickles out of your home machine. Fair enough. But if you need to do something with vinegar in it, and I have freeze dried pickles, they are very sour when

Anna Sakawsky:

I bet, yeah,

Carolyn Thomas:

They could be great, but I wouldn’t do it for every single run. If you need to clean your machine, check your owner’s manual, make sure it’s not going to void anything, but then I would do a run or two with that bread soaked in vinegar water.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, perfect. Okay, let’s talk about the seven steps to freeze drying. Let’s kind of back it up a bit. So what is the process? What does that look like?

Carolyn Thomas:

Okay, so I like to break everything down into simple steps to follow some of these steps. You don’t have to do every single time you’ve freestyle. Some of them are dependent on the food, but let’s start because step number one is preparing your food. This is where you’re pretty much just getting the food into the shape you want it to be in when it’s freeze dried. So this may be shredding something, it may be dicing, it may be juicing. Do not overlook your blender when you’re thinking about this. You do not. If you’re going to make garlic powder, don’t sit there and mince your garlic, throw it in the blender with a little water. You’re going to make powder anyways. Save yourself the time.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, okay.

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah. It’s just going to take the water right out and you’re going to end up with something that’s perfectly pable. If you’re doing something for fruit smoothies, don’t sit there and chop your fruit, run it through the blender, take two seconds, put it in the blender and pour it on the trays. So this is the preparing step is getting it into the shape that you want it to be in. You have a lot of flexibility with what you can freeze dry. We have freeze dried whole cooked hamburger patties. They are phenomenal and they rehydrate so well. Oh my goodness, you would not believe it. Wow. Okay. So you have a lot of flexibility. What you can’t change though is how deep your machine trays are. This is really important. The new machines that harvest rates coming out with, I think it’s the word pro, is in it. They’ve made it so that they have one more shelf in there than standard. The way they’ve done it though is they’ve just squished it all together. So you have a little less headspace, maybe let’s call it headspace on your tray.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay?

Carolyn Thomas:

So it’s not like a dehydrator where you slide one tray in and you run into the next tray is the next thing up. It’s actually a shelf that your trays sit on. So no matter what you don’t have, you couldn’t flexibility right and have extra space, and you really don’t want your food touching the shelf above it because that’s where all your heating elements, all your sensors, everything are on the bottom of those shelf. So you really need to keep it clear from those. So step number one, you’re just preparing your food. Step number two is really important and people miss this. Some foods must be pretreated in order to rehydrate well, they’ll freeze dry just fine, but they’re not going to rehydrate Well, green beans are the classic example of this. I have so many people say, oh, I don’t like green beans, freeze dried. They just never rehydrate, right? Well, I can guarantee that you didn’t water blanch your green beans first. Soon as you water blanch ’em, they’re going to rehydrate beautifully.

Okay? So you do need to make sure you’re aware of what needs to be pretreated, some other types of pretreatment, grapes, cherries, cranberries, blueberries, anything with a nice skin that goes all the way around it, man, that locks moisture in there. You wouldn’t believe you have got to get those poked or cut in half or you have to do something to them to split that skin before you put ’em in the freeze dryer. Otherwise, you’ll never get those things freeze dry. One time I tried grapes, I decided, oh, I’ll just see how long it takes. 3 72 hour runs later I gave up. I was like, they weren’t even halfway freeze dried. I’m like, I can’t do this anymore. Obviously this is a bad idea. So you have to do something to pop those skins on some of those. That all goes into pretreatment. This is a step that a lot of foods don’t need to be pretreated, but some do and the ones that do really do need to be or you’re going to get really bad results.

Step number three is pre freezing. I always recommend pre freezing full transparency. I don’t always pre forze, but I do always recommend it, and the reason is is that there’s actually a few reasons. One, you can save a lot of electricity pre freezing because your freeze dryer is not doing it. Your freezer that’s already running in the background is doing the work. Two, it makes your loads run faster because your machine isn’t taking the time to freeze dry it. So that’s a really great thing. That’s why it saves electricity. It’s not running as long. But the really big thing is that that vacuum pump that kicks on during the freeze drying process is really powerful, and if you put food into your freeze dryer and it is not solidly frozen when the machine, when that pump kicks on, it will actually suck it out of the tray and freeze it instantly as it’s sucking, which means you have this cotton candy like explosion that can happen all over your machine and it makes everything a mess. If anybody has done that, be very aware of that because you’ll clean and clean and clean and it is a disaster you don’t want to have to deal with. This happens especially for liquids that are high sugar,

And that’s because it takes a lot longer for them to freeze,

So they’re thick. So think like orange juice. Oh my goodness, that’s notorious for a disaster. The easy thing is, is that if you just pre freeze it for 48 hours, it’s frozen solid. It won’t do that. It can’t do that because it

Anna Sakawsky:

Can’t actually in 48 hours like getting it really because I like rock solid. I can admit I skimp on that. I’m usually like, okay, it’s been in there overnight, it’s frozen enough, but that still gives it a little bit of a headstart, right? That’s okay.

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah, it does. It does. But definitely if you’re doing anything that’s a thick sweet liquid, I would definitely just go ahead and do the 48 hours. I think

Anna Sakawsky:

I just need to get more trays. That’s the problem. I got to wait until they freeze and I got to, can you buy just extra trays so that you have the next meal? Double the amount of trays? Okay, yeah,

Carolyn Thomas:

Always have a second one. That way you have one ready. As soon as your machine defrost from the last one, you can pop it right in. So it actually saves you a lot of time if you do and you pre forze. So yeah, you want to pre forze. There are some things that just turn out better. Obviously if it’s something like ice cream, you have to pre forze, right? That’s just really not an option because you can’t let your ice cream melt before it’s frozen, but in the dehydrator. So step number four is the easiest step, and that’s the actual freeze drying step, and that’s where you just follow your onscreen prompts, do whatever your machine tells you and freeze dry your food. The machine does all the work. Now, the thing with the machine is it has little sensors in multiple parts on your machine where it tells you when the machine is done drying, but they’re not always perfectly accurate.

They can’t actually reach into the depths of your food to determine whether or not your food is done. So that is why step number five is determining doneness, and this is probably one of the most important steps as far as your skill as somebody who’s operating a freeze drying machine is making sure that your food is done. The easiest way to do this is to take your food out. As soon as your machine says it’s done, take it out and test it by touching it. There should be zero sensation of coldness in your food or heat because there’s no moisture left in there. Theoretically, if there’s no moisture left in, there’s no ice crystals in your food, so your food does not feel cold anymore. If your food feels cold, it needs to go back into the machine. If it feels wet, gummy, hot to the touch, cold to the touch, anything like that, it has to go back in for more dry time until it is completely crispy, powdery, and room temperature to the touch.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, that’s really good to know. Okay, so that’s step five. Is that right?

Carolyn Thomas:

That was step five.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, so determine your doneness.

Carolyn Thomas:

What’s next? Once it’s done, then we need to store our food properly. So step number six is storing your food. Now in the book I go into three different options for food storage. I go into long-term food storage. When you’re talking, we’re talking prepper pantry, 20 years, you don’t think you’re going to use it soon. This is long-term.

We talk about really short term storage, like I’m going to be snacking on this all week and I want to be able to reach my hand into the jar and eat out that jar for about a week or two. But what is most common is our medium term storage, and this is where you have a garden, you want to freeze dry your food and then you’re going to eat off of it for the next year or two. So this is really one to four year storage what you want to do. For me, I prefer glass mason jars, just good old canning jars. They don’t have to be canning jars. They can be repurposed grocery store jars. As long as you have a lid that will fit on it in a way that keeps a seal, keeps it airtight, I prefer these because if you can’t see a food, then it’s really hard to get it into your regular eating rotation. .

So I like to be able to go down to my pantry and see what’s in the jars. Your two options for vessels for sealing your jar, storing your food are mylar bags or glass jars. Those are your two main options. You cannot use plastic of any form.

Is actually not long-term airtight. It does slowly leak. Mylar and glass are the only things that you’re really going to get a solid seal. You could do metal, but I mean we don’t really have that type of container where it’s like stainless steel metal that’s going to store things all the way. Okay, so you’ve got to think about when you’re thinking about storage, you’re number one enemy for your freeze. Dried food is moisture,

Anna Sakawsky:

Right?

Carolyn Thomas:

And I don’t just mean getting wet because somebody spills a glass of water onto it. I mean even the moisture that’s in the air,

This is a major enemy for your food, so you need to protect your food from moisture at all costs, which means you need to keep it in an airtight container. Now, generally for medium term storage, I’m going to recommend that you put an oxygen absorber in it. Again, full transparency. In my home, I don’t tend to, because I live in a very dry environment, I don’t have a lot of moisture in my air. If you live in a humid environment, a hundred percent, put an oxygen absorber into your jar with your food or your Mylar bag, you really need to do that. If it’s a rainy day or a damp day out, put an oxygen absorber When you’re processing your food, put an oxygen absorber in there because all that’s going to do is it’s going to deal with the moisture that gets into your jar or your container when you’re packing it.

Okay? And then on top of that, your best bet is to figure out how to remove as much of the air in your container as possible. So that would be a vacuum sealer. So kind of best case scenario is your vacuum sealing a container and it has an oxygen absorber into it. Now, if you live in a very dry place, you can probably get away with a really full jar so it doesn’t have a lot of airspace left in it and just capping it down. I’ve actually had things last like that just fine. It’s not a good insurance policy though. If you want to make sure that your food is going to last and it’s going to be in great shape when you go to use it, make sure you have an oxygen absorber in there and make sure you vacuum sealed it. You can get those little teeny vacuum like hand vacuum sealers that just pop right on the top of your jar. I love those things. I have those. I have the four

Anna Sakawsky:

Jars one, it’s really cool. Four

Carolyn Thomas:

Jars makes a great one. Yeah, totally. I think it’s

Anna Sakawsky:

Pretty cheap too. It’s not a huge investment. They’re not

Carolyn Thomas:

Expensive. They’re easy to use. They just pop right on top of your little, your lid. I love it because you can use your used canning lids for this, so as long as they haven’t been damaged, then you can use those. Get one of four jars lid lifters that they have, and it helps keep your lids from getting damaged when you take ’em off your canning jars and then you can reuse that. It is just so much easier.

Anna Sakawsky:

Awesome. Okay, good. That makes me feel good because that’s what I do. I do the oxygen absorber and in usually quart size mason jars, and then I use the vacuum sealer and I reuse the lids. So glad to know. I’m like, I think I can do that with these. They seem to be sealing fine with these. It’s not canning where we’re not really supposed to be reusing lids, so that’s awesome. Okay, so

Carolyn Thomas:

Absolutely, you can definitely do it.

Anna Sakawsky:

What’s

Carolyn Thomas:

Step seven? Step number seven is rehydrating your food. Now, this one is obviously optional. Some foods are phenomenal, freeze dried and just dry in their dry state. We’re talking freeze dried bacon. Oh, so good. But your fruits, a lot of your fruits, you don’t necessarily want to rehydrate ’em. You can, but you don’t want to all the time. So just know that you have a lot of flexibility with this. The one thing that I really have to say here is that remember how we were talking about bacteria surviving the freeze drying process? That is really, really good news. If you’re trying to do your sourdough starter, it’s really bad news. If you’re talking raw steak that goes into your freeze dryer, right? You have to know that if you rehydrate something that went in raw, it’s still raw and the moment moisture hits it, you have to treat it raw. For fruit, that’s not a big deal. We don’t panic and get fruit into our refrigerator, raw meat, raw eggs. As soon as moisture hits that, you now have raw eggs just like you’d have if you cracked raw eggs into a bowl that were fresh.

So you need to deal with that. You just have to remember that in all of your handling, and you just go back to your, what do I do with raw meat? How do I handle raw meat? Yeah,

Anna Sakawsky:

Don’t leave

Carolyn Thomas:

It sitting in your head and handle it that way as soon as you put moisture on it. So this is a big safety precaution

Because that’s one of the cool things about freeze drying. I can freeze dry meat that is cooked, and when I rehydrate it, it’s cooked, it’s ready to eat, or I can freeze dry it raw, and when I rehydrate it, it’s still raw and I have to treat it raw and I still have to cook it somewhere in the process. I mean, presumably, right? So the big rule here, the big overarching principle is that if you have a raw food that was freeze dried, totally raw, you’re going to rehydrate it with cold water and it’s going to take a little bit more time, ?

Okay.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay.

Carolyn Thomas:

If you have a cooked food, you rehydrate that with hot water, like hot, liquid, hot, almost boiling water, and it’s going to rehydrate really quickly. So if we’re talking raw fruit, obviously you don’t really want that hot, you’re not going to use hot water. That one’s pretty intuitive. If you’re talking about raw vegetables, you’re going to want to use cold water to rehydrate it, and then you have the choice. Do you cook it afterwards or do you eat it raw? Because we eat vegetables raw, so that would be a normal thing. Or you can

Anna Sakawsky:

Just, if you’re doing a soup or something, a sauce, something with some liquid in, you could probably just add those. Or even with fruit, I’m thinking oatmeal, you can probably just put the freeze dried right into those, and then they’ll rehydrate as they go, right as

Carolyn Thomas:

They cut. You can definitely do that, and that’s another thing that I like to tell people. Don’t limit yourself to water, to rehydrate things. Imagine your steak that’s been rehydrated in a little bit of red wine or a little bit of beef broth or the options are endless. Imagine rehydrating your cantaloupe with lime water

Of just water

Or mint tea that’s been cooled. You can get really creative with your rehydration and it can add so many layers of flavor to it. Now, a lot of times people get really overly concerned, I guess, about the rehydration and about all these techniques that are out there like, Ooh, do I steam it to rehydrate it? Do I spray it to rehydrate it? Do I do all these different things? And the good news is that I have tried rehydrating a vast amounts of food at this point, and what I have found is that plain old pouring the right temperature water over food is drastically by far the most useful and the best method. I have rehydrated chocolate birthday cake with frosting on it to be an amazing, almost fresh consistency just by splashing little bits of warm water on it,

Anna Sakawsky:

And

Carolyn Thomas:

You put it on, you go slowly. If it’s something delicate like that,

Anna Sakawsky:

I was going to say probably it’s more about how much, you probably don’t want to dump a glass of water on that, but just a little bit of moisture.

Carolyn Thomas:

No, but there’s some things like if you’re rehydrating, let’s say that raw steak we’re talking about, you just put the whole thing in a big bowl of water, it’s not going to over hydrate. In that case, you’re not going to end up with a watery steak because of that. Now, a chocolate cake, yeah, it’s going to dissolve and turn into, I don’t know what in your water, so you’re going to really gently put it over the top, but it just still comes back really, really well.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, wow. Okay. Very cool. Okay, going to get through the next couple of questions I have as quickly as possible so that we can go to a few more q and as before we wrap up. So we’ve talked a lot about some of the mistakes that you’ve made and that sort of thing, some of proper storage techniques and proper rehydration and all that sort of thing. Are there any others that we’ve missed or that we should touch on common mistakes or things that people should be aware of?

Carolyn Thomas:

Oh, I am sure that there are, because there’s a few of ’em. The good news is I like to make all the mistakes out there and then tell you about it so that you guys don’t have to make the mistakes. Well,

Anna Sakawsky:

And the good thing is that you got a lot of that in this book, so for anybody who has freeze dryer or is seriously considering it like this, get this. I’m for real because this has everything. Even the pretreating, when you were talking about blanching vegetables, even with the peaches, I didn’t think about it at first, but you had mentioned to use some lemon juice so that it doesn’t oxidize and go brown, and that has definitely helped to preserve the peaches and keep that color and everything. So yeah, I’m sure that if there are any things that we’ve missed, all of that is covered and item by item in the book as well, which is really good. I do actually have, when I’m going to go to this one, because that’s kind of on this topic before I finish up with the last couple of questions. So Connie had asked, how come some of my freeze dried vegetables lose their color? I am using oxygen absorber and also vacuum seal my jars. So thinking maybe that has something to do with the pre-treating. What do you

Carolyn Thomas:

Think? Yeah, and I’ve got to tell you that some things just do lose a little bit of color. My tomatoes, when I freeze dry them, they turn out like pink, like a pale pink. The most amazing thing is is that when you go to rehydrate ’em, the color pops right back. So for some things it’s just kind of I guess a function of losing the liquid in the way that you use it, lose it for free drying. Other things that would be a signal that maybe you haven’t inactivated some of your enzymes in there enough and somehow we’re getting some loss of nutrients in that way. So that would be really looking at your pretreatment and if it’s a food that needs to be pretreated first in order to last the best, if you’re storing things in a glass jar light definitely depletes the nutrients. This is why we only do glass jars when we’re going to store things for a couple years. So it could be that you have something that’s really sensitive to light that the light just in your pantry, I don’t even mean direct sunlight is just slowly degrading it over the years. That might be something that’s better stored in Mylar bags.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay. Okay. So here we’re going to go to last couple questions that I have and then we’ll do a couple more Q and as before we wrap up. So my next question would just be about the value I guess that we’re getting out of this. So as we kind of alluded to it is a little bit of an investment upfront. These freeze jars run, I don’t know, somewhere from around the 2000 mark I think to upwards of like 4,000, I believe maybe closer to 5,000 for some of the pro ones. Obviously you have a large family, you’ve found it very useful. In fact, you now have three. So I know where you stand on it being a wise investment. For someone in your position who’s growing and raising a lot of their food, what do you think about somebody who’s maybe just getting started with gardening and homesteading and is just getting started with preserving or isn’t growing a lot of their own food or has a small family, is this worth the investment? Would you maybe start elsewhere and lead up to this? What would your honest advice be for somebody in that sort of position?

Carolyn Thomas:

I think so many things. It kind of depends. If you have any fear at all of food preservation of canning or anything like that, I would wait and make the investment in the freeze dryer because freeze dried food is just so safe. This is so much safer. You really don’t have to have a lot of the safety concerns that you would when it comes to canning specifically. So there’s always this question of the money aspect and do I spend the money on this? Because at the end of the day I can say it saves me time all I want, but the budget is still what the budget is at the end of the day, there’s still a hard dead end to how much money we can spend on something. For me personally, if I was starting all over again and I knew what I knew now, I would just save up until I could get a freeze dryer.

To tell you the truth, it just saves so much time and energy and allows me to put energy other places that that’s the way it would be the most efficient. If you’re brand new altogether to food preservation, you’ve never done anything and you’re not sure if you’re going to stick with it or you’re going to be interested in it, there might be another thing or two that you could do. Fermenting costs pretty much nothing to get started. You need some salt and some old used jars. That’s about it for fermenting. But if you have any inkling that you would love to have convenience foods on hand that you’d love to stop needing convenience foods from the grocery store, anything like that, free drying can save you so much money so quickly. Even if you’re not growing your own food out in your garden, it just can save you so much by getting, imagine that your leftover spaghetti turns into a meal that you can have a year later sitting on your shelf. That’s a game changer for busy nights. It’s a big deal. So for me, it makes sense just about in almost every single circumstance, even if I lived in the city had no gardens, I would have a freezer hands down.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, totally. And even just from a health standpoint, we actually, my mom bought some of those pre, I think it’s freeze dryer. They’re dehydrated anyway, but those hash browns that come in a little carton because she made a casserole the other night and she’s like, I rehydrated a couple of these not knowing how much they’d rehydrate. And so here you take some, so we did some of those up for breakfast and it could just taste a little bit different. I could just taste those. And of course I looked at the ingredients and there’s a bunch of extra stuff in there as preservatives, and my husband and I always looked at each other. Why do they need to do that? Because we can put it in the freezer and not have to add any of those extra things. Right? So yeah, I agree, and it depends on what your priorities are, but even if you’re not growing it yourself, if that’s important to you to know what’s in your food, this is a great way obviously to make sure that none of those extra additives and preservatives are getting in there and having shelf table food.

Carolyn Thomas:

Absolutely.

Anna Sakawsky:

Cool. Okay, so finally, what about, you’ve got two larges and an extra large. Is that correct for sizes? Yes. So do you have recommendations on choosing a freeze dryer and kind of family size and how much you think you’re going to use it? What would you tell people when they’re looking what size to get? I have

Carolyn Thomas:

Never yet met a person that said, I wish I got a smaller free dryer. Everybody that I’ve talked to who, especially if they start with a small, even if they’re a single person, say, I wish I got a larger freeze dryer. The exception would be I would not get an extra large unless you know, no know that you’re going to use that thing. Because even for my large family, the only time that that runs is like right now in the heart of harvest season when we’re running every moment we can, that thing, it’s double the size of a large. So it’s huge, very efficient, but it’s not something I can fill even on a normal gardening day. So up to a large, I would say get the biggest that you can stretch to afford, and you will be very happy with that because it just means you can be more efficient, you can just cook a little bit more of that meal that you’re cooking, fill it up, and it gets you that much more done all at the same time. Perfect.

Anna Sakawsky:

Awesome. Okay, so we’re coming up to two. It’s two 30 in our time. We’re in Pacific time, but we don’t want to go too far over. I know everybody’s busy, so we’re going to go to a few questions before we wrap up. So let’s see. Mary had a question. She said, my question is, can I pull finished trays from the dryer, from the freeze dryer and then put an extra set of prepared trays immediately into the dryer, or do I need to wait defrost and then start the whole process over again?

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah, you really do need to do the defrosting process, and the reason is is that ice starts to build up. So all that ice that builds up on the inside of your machine and then drains out into your bucket, that’s all the moisture that was in your food.

So it’s directly sucked out of your food. So you have to give the machine a moment to get rid of that ice, get it out, and then start over again. So you really do want to give it the chance to defrost. I’ll give you the boots on the ground real human who has a lot of food to preserve really fast version of that, and that is if you look in the machine and you just did a low moisture item and it just has a tiny little lining of frost on the inside of your drum and no buildup of ice, yeah, I would go ahead and stick the next batch right in. But if you look in and it has any ice buildup of any thickness, you want to make sure that you’re letting that totally defrost before you get the next batch in. Yeah,

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay. Alright, good advice. Okay, so Jen asked if everything is dry except for one tray. So maybe you touch some food on one tray and there’s just a little bit to put back in. Do I have to continue to dry everything or can I pop in only the one tray?

Carolyn Thomas:

If you’re positive that the rest of it’s totally dry, there’s no reason to keep drying it.

Anna Sakawsky:

So you don’t need to have all trays filled or anything for it to function correctly or

Carolyn Thomas:

Not if you’re on extra dry time.

So as far as popping it back in, because you’re already beyond their sensors, right? The sensors already telling you it’s dry and it’s not. So it’s wrong, but you do need to have all your trays filled and in there in order for the sensors to work properly in the first place. So don’t run a half full load if you, you don’t have enough trays to run, put some water in one of the trays and run it with just water in it, that’s fine. You will end up with a little mineral powder left, but make sure that you have something in the trays for your main run. The one thing you do need to be aware of is you really do want to warm your trays before you pull them out for storage. So you don’t want to pull your trays out cold. They’re freezing. Yeah. The reason for that is the condensation that forms, if you pull that tray out and it is like sometimes you’re pulling it out and it’s 10 degrees and you put that on your tray, if you have any moisture at all, you’re going to start condensation because that tray is so cold, like the dew point and everything, it’s going to suck that moisture right off. It’s also going to start to dehydrate, or I’m sorry, defrost right there, which is going to get your food wet in your tray.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay?

Carolyn Thomas:

And then you’re going to have a food that’s going into jars, not completely dry. Okay. Yeah. So what you do need to do, you still have to go, if you want to pull those trays out and they’re cold, you still have to go through the warm tray process to pull ’em out, to package ’em to put that one tray that’s not dry back in or leave it in there and then let it kind of cool back down and do the more dry time. The machine will take care of that, but you just need to make sure you go through that.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay. Okay. Good to know. Alright, so Leanne asked kind of on the same note, I recently freeze dried, diced garden tomatoes. It was a humid day when I took them out of the freezer jar. Within 15 minutes they were a bit softer than they were when I took them out of the freeze dryer. I proceeded to put them in quar sized jars, use the vacuum sealer to seal them. I was questioning whether they were too soft from each have gone forward with sealing them up. So on that note too, I would say, how do you know for sure if it seems dry? Because sometimes with dehydrated foods, sometimes they’re crispier if they go along, but sometimes they’re a bit more flexible and that’s okay. They’re still dry enough. How do you know, and if they do spoil in the jars, is it going to be obvious like mold or could there be an issue we get with canning jars where you get bots and we’re saying that you can’t tell if it’s gone bad?

Carolyn Thomas:

Right, great question. So first of all, something like tomatoes have those seeds and those seeds to lock moisture into them that you don’t know about. They take a little longer. So anything with those types of little seeds in them, even think if you’re freeze drying watermelon, it has those little white seeds in there, maybe those seedless watermelons, anything like that, you need to put it in for eight extra hours of dry time after you deem it, it’s done to make sure we get all the moisture out of those seeds. When you take them out of the machine, you need to package them immediately. They can’t sit for 15 minutes on your counter because they are instantly sucking moisture out of the air. So if your food, when you go to pull it out of the jar is anything less dry than totally crispy, crunchy powders in your fingers, then it wasn’t dry enough. ,

We can get into the line between where’s the common sense line? Where do we get to use our common sense versus what is super, super safe as far as food safety goes? The food safety line is that if there’s any moisture in it whatsoever, it’s not safe once it goes into those jars, right? The common sense line says, okay, is this a high acid? I would only even start to allow myself to think this way. If I had a really firm grasp on food preservation, is it really high acid food, like a fruit that I could water bath can all by itself? If it is, I know that bacteria can’t survive in that. But yeah, if you get enough moisture in your jar of meat that’s been freeze dried, then absolutely it can get botulism in it. ,

Bacteria can survive the freeze drying process. Absolutely. It can have it. Luckily that’s more like 15 to 20% moisture. You have to get in there. That’s a pretty wet item. So for me, the big test is if it’s not crispy dry anymore, then it’s too wet.

Anna Sakawsky:

And I was going to say, at that point you’d probably notice condensation on the jar. You’d notice that it was moist in there, right?

Carolyn Thomas:

It could. Yeah, it

Definitely could. Yeah. Okay. For things like fruit, if you have any question marks or even tomatoes are pretty high acid, if you had a question mark on it, you could do exactly what you do with dehydrated food, which is called conditioning it, which is where you take that jar, you leave it out on your counter for about two days and see if any condensation shows up on the inside of the jar and then it’s not done enough and you have to dehydrate it more, right? You can do that same thing for high acid foods. For low acid foods. You don’t want ’em sitting in a jar like that. The other issue that’s going to happen is it’s going to mold if it gets too wet, yes, you can see the mold. So that’s a less scary issue, but bacteria can happen. Bacterial growth and botulism can happen in any airless condition that has more than about 14% moisture in it and it’s low acid.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, well good. Now you need to be using those oxygen absorbers and all that is important too.

Carolyn Thomas:

And we do cover all of this in the book, so if you’re just like, oh, how do I know it is all written out in

Anna Sakawsky:

The book? Yes. And I was just going to say, because we’ll probably have time for a couple more questions and then we’re going to have to wrap up, and I know that there’s lots of questions and I see there’s more even coming in. So the book will answer most of these, the questions that you do have. And also Carolyn is a regular writer for Homestead Living Magazine, so if you guys have any questions for her on freeze drying or honestly on any of the topics that she covers, and she really is kind of a jack of all trades when it comes to homesteading, feel free, you can send them to hello@homesteadliving.com. And that always is helpful for me too, because then I know what you guys want to read about and I can pass that along to Carolyn. But we will finish up with a couple more questions. So Aubrey had asked, can you start freeze dried food in jars for as long as the Mylar bags? Will they last as long if they’re kept in a dark environment in jars?

Carolyn Thomas:

If they’re kept in a dark environment? Yeah, light is then your one thing that is kind of the, you don’t deal with in the jars that you do deal with in the Mylar bags. Mylar bags are completely light free, right? So they can’t get light in there. So as long as it’s kept dark, then yeah, absolutely.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay. Power rounds of questions here. Dax had asked, oh, Jen, I’m not sure who asked this, but what time, oh, maybe he was asking somebody else that was in the comments, but we’ll ask you too. So what time settings do you do for cheese and what type of cheeses do you do? So we had touched on some of the cheeses, but maybe you can speak to cheese specifically.

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah. Well, it’s important to note that your machines don’t have a time setting. You don’t input time into your machine. The sensors tell you when it’s done.

So on the settings though, you’ve just got kind of your on button. You do have customized settings. You don’t need to do any of those for your cheese. What I do like to do is make sure that I grated cheese, I think turns out best, but you don’t have to. We’ve done cheese and slices to be able to put on hamburgers when we want to. Oh my goodness. When you rehydrate it just on a hamburger and you rehydrate it with the juice of the hamburger, so good. Same thing with tomatoes. We slice tomatoes and freeze dried them, sliced. We put ’em directly on our burgers and just let it rehydrate from the juices at the burger. Oh, no more going to the store for those awful tomatoes that are like cardboard juice. I know,

Anna Sakawsky:

Because when we want to have burgers in the winter, oh, I hate the tomatoes. I know. You’re like, why am I buying

Carolyn Thomas:

These? Okay, I’m going to try that. And I’m glad we talked about it. I haven’t freeze dried any of those yet this year.

Anna Sakawsky:

Awesome. Okay, cool. Another real quick one. Can you bake with freeze dried eggs? So do they act kind of? Absolutely. They’re raw. Obviously. If you’re cooking them and scramble them first, then they’re going

Carolyn Thomas:

To, oh, that would be gross dehydrate

Anna Sakawsky:

Eggs. Don’t do that. Make sure you’re labeling your eggs. I’d say, right. If you do both raw and cooked, you are going to want to know which one’s, because do they look pretty similar once they’re in dried powdered form?

Carolyn Thomas:

Well always, always label ’em, but I don’t think you would powder your scrambled eggs if you wanted to rehydrate scrambled, cooked eggs it. But it’s always good. I tell everybody in my house, we label everything with an FD for freeze dried just in case there’s confusion because we do still dehydrate some things. And that’s kind of the only thing that you’re going to confuse look-wise with freeze dried, and you have to treat them differently and you use them different between dehydrated and freeze dried, but you always label if something is raw or cooked. Always important.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, that’s a good tip. Okay, Sherry, do you sterilize jars before you add your freeze dried food? Is it like canning where you want to make sure it sterilized?

Carolyn Thomas:

No, you don’t even have to sterilize canning jars anymore. They took that recommendation away a couple years, quite a few years ago. You want to make sure they’re clean for obvious reasons, and you want to make sure they’re dry all the way dry, completely dry. Otherwise you’ll ruin your food as soon as you put it in. But yeah, just nice and clean. That’s good enough.

Anna Sakawsky:

Awesome. Okay, last question we’re going to take right now. Barbara says, I inherited a 2017 model freeze jar. What are the pros and cons of older versus newer models? And I’m sure you can speak specifically to harvest, right? At least with these.

Carolyn Thomas:

Yeah. Really? Yeah. Nothing else existed back then. So you’re pretty good with the harvest, right? The pumps and the way they run. You can update the software to some of the newer software, but it’s really the pump you have to be aware of because it used to be that you would have to change the oil literally when they came out. You had to change the oil every single run. The newer premium model pumps, it’s like 30 to 50 runs before you have to change ’em. Of course, they have the oil free pumps. Some people love ’em. I don’t tend to recommend ’em. They have a lot more problems from my experience and from what I’ve heard from people. And they’re loud. So go with the premium pump and yeah, that would be the big thing of the older ones.

Anna Sakawsky:

Perfect. Okay, well, we are going to wrap up. We are well over. Well, we’ve been going about the hour and a half mark lately because everybody that we’ve had on it just has such a fantastic wealth of information to share. And if you have joined us on past episodes of the coop, you know that every time, every month we have somebody new on who’s kind of an expert in that particular thing. Carolyn, you are 100% the expert on freeze drying. I can’t think of anybody better to share this information with us. So thank you so much for being here today. You guys, if you love this conversation, then you’re definitely going to want to get yourself a copy of Carolyn’s book if you don’t have one yet. So again, it’s called Freeze Drying the Harvest. You can head to homestead living.com to grab your copy.

And if you’re not subscribed to Homestead Living Magazine yet, then make sure that you do that. You can also do that@homesteadliving.com, or you can do that at, sorry, there should be a link below the video where you can subscribe now and you will be in time to get next month’s issue. So with that, we’ll wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us today, Carolyn, and then next month if you join us again, we’ll be back. I think we’ve got Joel s joining us next month. So very exciting things. And I think, Carolyn, you’ve got another article coming up soon, so again, if there’s anything that Carolyn, we didn’t get a chance to answer today or that you would like her to write about in future issues of the magazine, you can send in your questions or comments to hello@homesteadliving.com. And yeah, that’ll help make sure that we are publishing exactly what you guys want to read and learn about. Alright, well thank you very much guys, and we will see you back again next month.