Freeze dryer/drying

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Well life reared it's ugly head this past week and I didn't order it yet. It's happening later today, though.

As much as I would like a large and all of it's advantages, I am going to have to go with the medium. There is a $1000.00 price difference that I cannot ignore; money that can be spent elsewhere.
 
Well my freeze dryer has shipped. It spent a week in Salt Lake and is now supposed to be on a truck headed up here. I hope they keep it moving north and not side to side.

Apparently, I need to have a road and driveway that can accommodate a semi truck. I do but I don't think they are going to be happy with the distance. I will call the trucking company in town that takes large fed ex packages and have them arrange for it to be dropped there. Everyone, including me and the truck driver will be happy, plus, the local trucking company will load me up with used pallets while I am there.

It's supposed to arrive May first. I should be so lucky.
 
My freeze dryer arrived. Went into town to pick it up. It looks like customs got curious and cut up the packaging and didn't repack it.

Trucking company said to take it home and check it out. If it didn't work, bring it back Tuesday and they would send it back, over someone's dead body. It will remain listed as not picked up until then and if necessary, labeled as damaged in shipping.

Technically it looks OK, but it was laying on it's side on a piece of styrofoam. It's brains and innards could be rattled. Can't plug it in until tomorrow to find out.

Dang that thing is small. I knew I would need a large, but a medium is better than nothing. Sure hope I don't have a lemon because I need to keep it going 24/7 for a long time..
 
I found a site for harvest right lemons and hundreds of po'd owners of useless machines last night. I knew there were problems, but never getting them fixed and no refund! Lost a few hours of sleep on that one and then I see my baby lying on the floor this morning. Of course I didn't find that site pre order and none of the new brands ship outside the US.

Amish,
I take it you skimmed the milk first? I would appreciate an update on how that reconstitutes.
Was that 35 hrs after pre frozen? It's going to take forever to get stuff processed.

I am looking forward to freeze drying my eggs instead of dehydrating them. A longer shelf life is good when one has a ton of them.

I have a whole freezer of fruit and veggies to do, around a 100 lbs of cheese and a whole frozen lamb to break down and turn into something or other for freeze drying. After that there are 5 more freezers to take a look at. I hope to refill any newly empty freezers with doggy meat scraps from the butcher. They are good for the chickens too.

Hubby blew a wide mouth canning jar up, in the chamber vac sealer. He screwed the lid down too tight and there were some air pressure issues. I'll have to clean a mess of fine glass shards out of that tomorrow. He is banned from touching my canning jars now. The food saver attachments will have to suffice.
 
Nope, didn't skim the milk. Got the idea from the youtuber "The Macs". I have freeze dried lots of sourcream, too, and turns out fine.
We had a huge error on ours, and thankfully husband got ours fixed. There are updates you have to install, and one was bad. It blew the board. But we didn't know that, and it was a pain. Customer service at Harvest Right was decent. They did send another board and he installed it. It would be near impossible to send this one back, it weighs a ton.
 
If everything is working fine, is there any reason to install an update? As in, if it ain't broke don't fix it?

It's beginning to look like Billy gates does the programming for them with a little help from his friend Turdo.

Will be running a 20 Amp circuit for it today or tomorrow and then it's showtime.
 
I have mediums. My broccoli does not turn to powder. When I have an abundance of lettuce, kale,and such. I toss those into the vitamix along with water and make a runny slurry. Pour onto trays and freeze then toss in fd. When it is done it is easy to smash by hand and toss into jars or bags. I do the same with beets and beet tops. Kinda like my own super beet. Had a bunch of cherry tomatoes last year, tossed them in the vitamix whole, slurried up and poured onto trays. I like to do it this way if I am just tossing onto salads or into sauce. Doesnt take as long as sliced tomatoes. But those are delicious as a snack.
i have one of those things that are funnel shaped with a shut off at the bottom. It separates the water perfectly from the oil. i dispose of the water and then toss the oil into the pitcher to do a second filter, then toss back into my oil jug that was empty and write on each one how many times the oil was filtered. Then toss out after the 5th filtering.
i do my raw milk the same as Amish H. Just shake thenjug and pour onto the trays.
i pretty much always freeze everything first, then toss into fd.
@Amish Heart how did the meatloaf reconstitute?
my feeling is, if you get caught up on everything you want to do. As of now, if you want to sell it, you are almost guaranteed to do so.
 
ClemKadiddlehopper said:
For those of you with freeze dyers, do you have a door pillow for it? If you don't, do you think the run times are longer or that the door is developing crazing? Apparently they now say it's not needed, but I am not convinced. I can make one if I need to.
Click to expand...
My one came with a pillow. I used it all the time. The newer does not have one and there is no difference at all. I have even quit using the pillow.
 
same here, I have run multiple loads thru two driers and the doors still work and are not crazed. Insulation is probably a good thing tho. Having no door pillow let me see the science experiment the one time I forgot to close the drain valve and the machine sucked up a bucket of water......
 
Ha, is that what happens? I wondered.
I don't have a door pillow, or anything extra. If I bought anything extra, I'd get extra trays to prefreeze. But I don't have room in the freezer right now anyway.
Just took our shredded mozzarella chesse, and put in beef bone broth. Next will be butternut squash soup. There were big frozen bags of it at the amish store for $1.50 a bag, and I got two. Should fill up four trays.
 
I can tell you that there are many youtube videos of people doing it. I didn't watch them because it is not on my food list.

Amish,

I was watching 👀late last night on YouTube. Just before you got company, you mentioned horrible problems with your freeze dryer. Any chance you are willing to elaborate?

We are running an electrical cable today, so hopefully I can try mine out tomorrow, I have downloaded the fixit/trouble shooting videos and was wondering if I should just redo all the common leak sites and not wait for the fun to begin. I am going to replace the drain valve for sure; it is garbage.
 
Yep FD mac and cheese. It was fine.
The horrible problem I had was after an update and I didn't put the two together. Harvest Right said the update had a virus, and some people were affected. We were one of those. And it fried the circuit board. Husband wasn't well at the time, and I don't deal with mechanical anything, so I turned it off. 4 months later he was on a mission to see what was what. We had not had it very long. Ended up getting a new circuit board sent from Harvest Right. He installed it. But you have to go in thru the top of the machine, and ours is a large on a high table, and he is handicapped. So our neighbor came to lift it down to a shorter strong table, because I couldn't lift it on my own, and husband can't lift anything. So the neighbor saw our food storage area. One of them anyway. Oh well. It's a neighbor that I would feed. And he has lots of cows. And a horse and buggy if cars don't work, so I'm not stressing all that much.
 
My first machine not ever gave me problems until 8-9 months in. It was an easy fix but for the life of me ai cant remember what it was, hubby did put one of those valves that have a big handle on the air release hose but still left the shut off valve to the air hose on just added the big one after it . Works fine. I personally wouldnt do much to it. Not all of the machines will give you trouble.
 
lilmissy said:
Anyone ever fd homemade mac and cheese
Click to expand...
should work if that's what you want. I like our FD lasagana
and it tastes great.
I have not changed any of the programing or done any updates on my FD. It works just fine. My drain valves have also performed flawlessly. Our 1979 house wiring also supports the large FD without any extra circuits But then I also can run a 120 volt welder off the house system as well.
 
I have seen where people change things so they can FD candy or whatever. I bought mine for preservng food, so I stick pretty much with that. each load I try to have similar moisture content starting out.
I am blessed to have discoered FD and I think what i am doing now will make a difference for some people in the future.
 
I finally got my freeze dryer set up and ran the test and bread clean batch. So far its working good. I will put some frozen fruit in this morning so that I can take a sample to my son's in house in four days.

The condensation on the door is a bit much. I am going to make a pillow. I can see what it is for, now.
 
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Apparently the power went out during the freeze cycle for 39 minutes. It started itself up, and kept going.

Yesterday when I did the bread test, I was suffering from newbie curiosity. I wet a paper towel, wrung it out and wrapped the dried bread in it. I then put it in an open zip lock and forgot about it until a while ago when I spotted it again. The bread was reconstituted perfectly, so it can be done, but very slowly.
 
ClemKadiddlehopper said:
Apparently the power went out during the freeze cycle for 39 minutes. It started itself up, and kept going.

Yesterday when I did the bread test, I was suffering from newbie curiosity. I wet a paper towel, wrung it out and wrapped the dried bread in it. I then put it in an open zip lock and forgot about it until a while ago when I spotted it again. The bread was reconstituted perfectly, so it can be done, but very slowly.
Click to expand...
Nice to kwnow. I didn't even think about freeze drying bread.
 
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