I Tested Freeze Dried Foods for 3 Years, Here's What I Found.

It's been three years since I purchased my Harvest Rite freeze dryer, and that has given me a lot of time to try a bunch of different freeze-dried recipes. So today, I'm gonna share with you everything that I've made, what I think of it, and we're even gonna do some taste tests. Hey, friend, I'm Petrina with Homegrown Florida, and I like to do a lot of gardening. So I produce a lot of food out of our one four-square-foot garden here in Central Florida, and out of that comes a lot of excess, a lot of the harvest we can't eat just when it's fresh. Now, that's something that I have actually been working on doing a little bit more, is having year-round gardening that we can eat fresh from, but a lot of the times, you get this bounty, this huge amount of food, and you gotta figure out what you're gonna do with it, and in my early days of preservation, I was doing things like dehydrating and canning and freezing, and I still do some of that, but ever since I got the Harvest Rite freeze dryer, like, I have really gotten into freeze-drying because it really is one of the easiest, this less amount of rules. It's so hands-off. It does take some time, and I wanna dismiss that. This thing takes, and it runs a lot, but it doesn't require anything from me. The food lasts for 30 years, and the amount of nutrition that's left in the food after it's processed is like 90-plus percent, which is far, far greater than most other preservation methods, like canning or dehydrating. I think freezing, you can maintain quite a bit of the nutritional value, but freeze-drying maintains the most for the longest amount of time, and that's why I love it. So let's go in my freeze-drying pantry and talk about the first item on the list, which was all the fruit. All the way at the top of my pantry is the freeze-dried items, and we're gonna start right here, which is the fruits and this shelf right here, which I have pineapple, banana, yogurt. I know, not a fruit, but I keep it with my smoothie supplies. I have lemon to make lemon juice. I have mixed berries. I've got strawberries. I've got whole strawberries, strawberries, powders. I've got grapes, pears, roselle, all kinds of things, and I think that when it comes to teas and seasoning, we're gonna talk about that in a little bit, but those do really well, but I think fruit is one of the ones where it really just shines because everyone loves freeze-dried fruit. It just tastes so good. It's like the concentrated sweetness. Oh, I forgot, out of here, yeah. I forget what I have sometimes. That was from our peach harvest this year, actually, 2026. We had an excess amount, and we didn't really like them canned. I thought we would, but they kinda get a little bit mushy when they're canned, and when they're freeze-dried, I can take them out of this, rehydrate them, and it's just like regular peaches, and they still have that firmness to them, which is nice. I have loquats. That's also from my tree out back, and I wasn't exactly sure how these were gonna turn out because I just freeze-dried loquats. I don't know. It seemed like freeze-dried oranges or freeze-dried lemons, and it actually turned out really good. They're basically candy. It's so good, and that's what got me to do the lemon as well. Once I knew that you could do a citrus flavor and that it wasn't gonna be weird, then I was like, oh yeah, we're gonna be doing that. I got mandarins coming in, more lemons, finger limes, kalamandan. I'm gonna freeze-dry all those. In this one, I freeze-dried watermelon, which, by the way, takes absolutely forever. I think it was like four days of running the freeze dryer. I'm not sure I'd do that again just for how long it took, but maybe what I would do instead is turn the watermelon into a liquid on the stove, and then cook it down to try to release as much of the water as possible, and then freeze-dry it as a puree. I think that would work better because that got crazy. All right, I also have strawberry banana. I have strawberry banana powder, which is what I make more of now. This is actually strawberry and banana pieces, which is really great as snacks for when my nieces and nephew come down. I have some apples, and then I have whole pieces of roselle, not just the tea broken-up pieces. And now let's make something with it. I haven't had breakfast yet, so I figured what we can make is a smoothie. So we're gonna grab our yogurt, our banana, and our mixed berry. I like to do this in a smoothie blender cup. This is our Ninja smoothie, little blender cup thing. I don't know. First, start out, add a little bit of water. Then I'm gonna put basically two tablespoons of each one of these. Goodness. It's really up to you how much you want. I kinda like the strong banana flavor, so I guess it's a heaping, heaping tablespoon. Now, you don't have to use a blender cup. You could just soak it in water. It will absorb, but you'll have to shake it or mix it with a spoon or something. I'm gonna probably do about the same amount of the mixed berry. And then the yogurt is actually something I did, and I didn't know if it would go well, but it did really well. So the yogurt is basically, I bought a container of yogurt that had probiotics in it, and then I got a gallon of milk, and using my Instapot yogurt settings, I made this huge batch of yogurt. It was so much cheaper to do it that way than to just buy yogurt. And that way, I got this huge amount of yogurt to put in my smoothies. Once again, very heaping tablespoon. And I was able to make a large quantity, and then I just laid it in the freeze dryer trays, put it in the freeze dryer, and then freeze dried it all, turned it into a powder. It was awesome. And it has been night and day difference in terms of having really, really good smoothies. Now, let's get some more water in this. You can see it's just powder sitting at the top. So we're gonna add water, and we're gonna add ice. I wish I could tell you perfect instructions of how much water to add to it, but really what I do is I just add a small amount and then taste it, and then keep adding small amounts until it's the consistency and everything that I like. There is calculations that you can do, but I am way too lazy for that, where you just measure your trays before, measure your trays after, and then break it down into tablespoons and calculate it into how much water. I'm not doing all that. I just do it by taste. Weirdly enough, I think I got the right consistency on the first try. That has never happened, so that's cool. All right, now, yeah, it's a little thick. I could add a little bit more water, but it's so hot out, it's just gonna melt, so it'll be fine. Let's give it a taste. That's perfect. This is like a mixed berry banana yogurt smoothie. It's perfect. I know some people won't like this, but it even has the strawberry seeds that you crunch on when you get a smoothie. Now, the next item is gonna be all the vegetables, and I grow a lot of vegetables, so I end up with a lot, and this isn't all of it. It's just I pulled one down of each so that you could see. So this one was really fun. This was a tomatillo salsa, which I don't love it rehydrated. I did rehydrate it. I don't love the pieces. I blended it. It was better, but I'm actually thinking of using it as a seasoning. We're gonna talk about that later. Another one that I kinda use as a seasoning is tomato powder, but you can use this in a bunch of different ways. You can turn it into tomato sauce. You can make it tomato juice. You can make it tomato paste. You can do pretty much anything with tomato powder. Another couple more was pumpkin puree, so instead of canning pumpkin, which I absolutely hate, or taking a brew in my freezer, I just freeze-dry it into a powder, and then I can use this at the holidays. I don't do a lot with pumpkin puree, but I do use it during the holidays, and so that is nice to just have it on the shelf, and then this one is zucchini flour. It's actually just ground or powdered zucchini. I had a really great year of trombacino squash, which is like a zucchini that grows really well down here in the South. I had so much of it. I didn't know what to do with it. I have some of it in whole form. I have some of it shredded for zucchini bread, and then I made the rest of it into powder, and I have a ton of this up there, and I actually use this to add vegetables into our baked goods, so basically you can take a third of the all-purpose flour and replace it with zucchini flour, and you will not notice a difference in the rise or in the taste or flavoring of your baked goods, but you add vegetables to it, and nobody will know. You can't see it. You can't taste it. You can't smell it, nothing. Great little hack to spread your flour a little bit longer and add more nutrients, and then probably one of the things I have the most of right now because I have just had an incredible two years of peppers is gonna be hot peppers and sweet peppers. I have them in glass jars that I use within the next year, and then I had to create even more in mylar bags because I just had so much of it. There was no way that we were gonna go through that in a year, and then this last one is cucumber. I had a good cucumber year, not this year, but the year before, so I had like four of these jars filled with shredded cucumber, which is outstanding. I use it to make tzatziki, or you can just put it in like dressings and stuff, especially like Greek dressings, Mediterranean-style dressings and stuff like that. It's so good. I have a ton of peppers. Okay, this is all hot and sweet peppers, so every single one of these has either sweet or hot peppers, and I have so many of them, and then this one, we have a couple different things. Cauliflower rice, had a good cauliflower year, so I made that. We have a mixed veggie, so you don't have to just do single ingredients like I do sometimes, and this one, I had squash, tomatoes, onions, and peppers. You could put this together, add a little bit of broth to it, and you will have like a vegetable soup, and then a couple other ones. I had a lot of sweet potatoes that I wanted to process, and they were in, they keep in my shelf, so I don't really have to do anything with those, but they keep for about a year. These were the ones that were getting close to the year mark, so I needed something to do with them, so I did a cinnamon and sugar sliced sweet potato, so I just baked off the sweet potatoes, added cinnamon and sugar to it. So good. Great little snack. And then hash browns. I have very little freezer space, and so I do like frozen hash browns, but I don't wanna take up that much room in my freezer, so whenever we have a good white potato harvest, I make hash browns, and then we freeze dry them. I just wanna ask if you're thinking about getting a Harvest Right freeze dryer, if you could use my link below. It's a great way to support the channel if you find the information that I give you is interesting. So make sure to use my link in the description below. This is a Harvest Right medium, and I use the oil pump if that's something that you wanna get into. I think if you have a family of two or more, the medium or the small works just perfect. If you're more of a family of four, maybe you have a bigger garden, maybe you keep chickens, those kinds of things. I've heard a lot of people like the large, and they really encourage people to get the large. The downside of the large is that you do have to have an electrician come out and do a change to your electrical. When it comes to the medium and the small, you don't have to do that. So if you are interested in getting one of these, use my link below. Thank you, guys. Don't worry, we still got whole meals and snacks to go through, but let's talk about powders, because I think that these are things that you don't think of that are actually really helpful. So one of the first powders is milk, so dry milk. I have a couple of those. Something that I wanted to try, because I do a lot of broth, like canning broth, and I still do, because I do like this. This is very helpful. But I wanted to see what would happen when you freeze dry broth. And this is what it is. It's kind of like this weird crystallized, I don't know, it's a weird powder, but you just add water to it and it becomes broth again, which I think is so cool. Some other ones that we talked about already was like the lemon, the banana, the yogurt, the strawberry, the zucchini flower, and then this whole bin of flowers. Oh, this is my favorite one, you guys. This is our last bag. I have an avocado tree. It kept freezing during winter. It wasn't doing well. I had to switch it out for a new variety. I had had that tree for like three or four years and it was producing, and I had one really good year of avocados, and I made guacamole. Now, I have heard people say that avocados don't freeze dry well, so I never really did it. I just went straight and made guacamole. This is outstanding. This tastes like everything you want in a guacamole. This is our last bag, so we're like protecting it. I have more banana powder. I have a greens powder. This is probably one of the first things I ever made. I probably won't make it again, but if you're into this, like, you know, you could put this in your smoothies. I don't want my smoothies to be green. I don't know. I'm a visual eater, so green smoothies just, I don't know. Anyway, this is like kale, collards, different kinds of greens, mustard, spinaches, those kinds of things, and I just cooked it, blanched it, and then freeze dried it, and it makes like a vitamin powder, so you could put it in smoothies. You could put it in soup. You could do whatever you want with it. It adds more nutrients. You could put it probably as part of the zucchini flour. Have some more of the squash or the pumpkin puree. I have more of the bone broth and zucchini flour, and then I have powdered Roselle, so I have Roselle as whole fruit. I have it as a tea, which is just like slightly chopped, and then this one is pureed, so this is just a powder. I actually like to use this to make the Roselle tea, or honestly, I use it to make like a Roselle juice, so it's kind of like tea, but you just mix it with water, and it's like a juice. You could add some of the lemon, and it would be like a lemon Roselle, and it changes the color. It's so really cute. This smoothie is hitting the spot. Next one is the most exciting, and that's gonna be things that are like whole meals. Do you see that? Raviolis with meat sauce, and this is mashed potatoes, but you can also do meat. I did a chili that has steak in it, more of the mashed potatoes. It has butter, sour cream. I think it even has like bacon and cheese in it as well, because I kind of like my mashed potatoes as loaded mashed potatoes. I have unstuffed peppers, so this has ground beef, peppers, rice. Then I have chicken noodle soup that has the egg noodles, the chicken, and the vegetables. I've been wanting to try this one because I haven't opened it, but it's the chicken and dumplings. I made chicken and dumplings in the oven, and then I scooped it out and put it on a freeze-dryer tray. This is where this thing shines, because if you want to like really create a backstop, and you don't want to have to do like special cooking, just make double the recipe that you're making for dinner, and then throw them on a tray. It works every time. And then here, I just did some typical rice and beans. This is almost doesn't make sense to do because rice dried lasts for like forever, and so do beans, especially white rice, but I wanted to add the vegetables to it, and the seasonings and stuff. So it's honestly just so that we can travel when we go camping and make something super quick by just adding water to it. But the one I have been dying to try, and we're gonna go ahead and open it today, is going to be the pasta with meat sauce. This is spaghetti with meat sauce. So this is a ground beef and tomato sauce. I haven't opened some of these. We've opened some that we went camping with, but these are usually what we save for camping, or when the hurricanes come through and knocks out our electricity. It's nice to be able to just throw some hot water on a meal, but we haven't had that happen a lot. We've had like a year with no storms, and the year before that, we had one storm, and our electricity was out for like 48 hours, so we didn't need to break into these things. So they've just been sitting here since 2024. So let's open this one, and let's make it, and let's see what it's like. I've never actually rehydrated these before. I've rehydrated the soups, and the unstuffed peppers, and things like rice and beans, but I haven't done something like this. So we're gonna put some hot water on, and we're gonna get this guy out of here. I'm honestly, I think it's like one serving. Or it might be two servings. It's probably two servings based on 181 grams. I'm guessing it's two servings. Let's see, oh my gosh. It looks exactly the same as when I put it in there. Okay, let's pull it out, and take our oxygen absorber out. I'm wondering, do I need both? Well, might as well, right? It's so interesting looking. I wanna make sure I get all of that sauce in the bottom. Okay, so I don't know how much water to use in this instance, but I do know it needs to be hot, and I do want it to kinda steam, so I'm gonna put aluminum foil over the top of this so that it can steam. Our water is done. It's nice and boiling hot, and I'm just gonna eyeball it, guys. Basically, just trying to make sure the bottom has plenty of water, and the top has some water. So I think I'm gonna go with that, just, no, probably a bit more. It's okay if it ends up soupy. And then we're just gonna cover it and let it set for five minutes. While we wait for that pasta, my husband has requested some pears. He's like, since you're opening up a bunch of stuff, can you grab me some pears? So, let's make him a little bowl. This time, we're gonna use cold water, though, because he wants to eat pears in hot water. You could totally just eat them dry. That's so good. We're gonna add a little water, because he's really just wanting canned pears. So I think we're gonna get that kinda consistency by putting some water in it. It basically hits the water and immediately starts to dissolve. Still needs to absorb for a little bit. All right, so it's been, I don't know, probably 10 minutes I've walked away. Let's see how we're doing. Oh, it used up all the water. It is not done yet. Okay, let's do a little bit more. My husband just asked me, how do you know how much water to add? And I was like, I just go until God tells me that that's enough. It's a feeling, I think. So you just start low, and then you just keep going slowly over time. And just let it rest. Okay, and the little crunchy pieces, like I have some crunchy pieces. See, it absorbs it like almost immediately. Like you can see, like I put the liquid in there and there's like a tiny bit. So I think I need a little bit more, because they're still like, these pieces are still kinda crunchy. At this point, I'm going very slow, because you don't want soup. You don't want soup. You want spaghetti. Look at that. Looks like a bowl of spaghetti, right? Even picks up kinda like that. I'm gonna let it soak for another five minutes. Okay, it's been sitting a little bit longer. Almost all of the liquid. I felt like it's just a little bit in the bottom. I don't think that's too much. I'm curious the taste. First off, is it warm enough? Yeah. It's still warm from the hot water. Here's the real test, right? Let's try eating it. I feel like it's completely hydrated at this point. Look, the noodles. Mm. Y'all. Let's try the meat. That tastes just like the day I put it in there. That's so good. Mm. Like I like long noodles and they didn't hold that, but it's not that they're mushy. It's almost like they got cracked when they were dry. Mm-hmm. That's really good. I love spaghetti. Yeah, the noodles aren't mushy, like you would think from the absorbing of the water. In fact, they're actually al dente, perfect. And the meat tastes, the meat and the sauce tastes just like, this is my homemade sauce. That's another thing I just love about freeze drying is you don't have to follow a recipe like you do with candy. Use your own recipe. Make your own stuff. You got a pot of spaghetti and not everybody ate it all, just throw it on a tray. Man, it's a little early in the day to be eating spaghetti, but I like it. I could not be more pleased with that. I was a little worried. Noodles get soggy. People have talked about the meat, the spaghetti and meat sauce flavor doesn't work well once you've had it in a Mylar bag, but that's been two years in that bag. Mm, that is so good. Okay. We're gonna take a pause so I can show you the rest. I'm gonna be raving about that spaghetti and meat sauce for a while, but we have one more thing I wanna show you and that's gonna be eggs. Now, I personally freeze dry my eggs raw and it's a really easy process. I just take like 60 eggs, crack them all, blend them in a food processor and pour them onto the trays. I don't even freeze them. I stick them in my freeze dryer, but I do change the temperature down to like, what is it, like negative 10, negative 20, something like that. I just make it a little bit colder because what happens when you freeze dry stuff that is not frozen first, if it doesn't completely solidify by the time the vacuum comes on, it causes like this implosion. So you just have to make sure either freeze your eggs ahead of time in the trays or when you put them in there, put the temperature down or the time longer in the freezing mode. So that way you make sure that it's solidly frozen. And I put my measurement on here because this was one of the first things that I ever made and I wanted to make sure I understand the measurement, but it's basically like equal eggs to water. So if you're doing a tablespoon of eggs, you do a tablespoon of water. And I believe it's two tablespoons eggs, two tablespoons water is one egg. No, maybe it's one in one. I have found this works best. Now I have not done it with cooked eggs just because I feel like when you do it with the raw eggs and then you cook the raw eggs, like it tastes, texture, everything is exactly, exactly like eggs. Now what we use these for, honestly, like baking, I always keep one jar in the cantry so that that way I can use it whenever I want, just pop it open, use it. And then when we use all this up, we pull one out of the Mylar bags and refill this. Another time that we use these was when there was a lot of the egg issues, like when they were having, you know, the birds were passing away from that bird flu situation and the eggs were incredibly expensive. We eat a lot of eggs, especially my husband. I think he goes through like four eggs a day. And then I usually eat like two eggs a day. So we're eating like six eggs a day. It's a lot of eggs for us. When they really go up in price, like it really hurts our grocery budget. And this is like a great time that when they're down in price that we go and we buy a 60 or 120 pack of these things and we freeze dry them. Right now, I think right now we have like a four month supply. And I know that this doesn't seem like four months, right? Cause it's like, that doesn't look like very many eggs. Well, you just have to remember that when you freeze dry them and powder them down, like half of this jar is, I think, I think this whole jar, it might be 60 eggs. I mean, it is a lot of eggs that once they're powdered down fit into a very small space. That's another thing I really love about freeze drying. You see all this, this is all of my canning stuff, right? And it's taking up a majority of the shelves, but just the top shelf and a couple items on the second shelf is my freeze dried items. And it's like so much food comparatively to this stuff. Now, when you bring it down to a powder, you get like even more, like space wise. I will say that the Mylar bags are not as like visually easy to manage. They're kind of like, these are the bins. I got them from Walmart and these have worked for us really well in containing all of our stuff and being organized, but they're still not the easiest. Like I have to open them up and look through them all. I could make like a worksheet or something that tells me, maybe I could post it on the front of this thing or on the top lid that tells me exactly, you know, what is in each one of these bins. I haven't done that. We go through this stuff much faster than I thought we would. I thought we would just use this as like long-term camping or for, you know, like hurricanes when the power's out and stuff like that. And we do use it for those items, but we use it even more. Like I ended up moving, I used to do just Mylar and I ended up moving to the glass jars so that I always have some in a glass jar and some in a Mylar, because the glass jars are just easier to like open and work out of. And then I just refill them from the Mylar bags. But this is just like our working area that we're constantly using. And whenever my nieces and nephew come, we run out of fruit because they eat me out of fruit. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today as we went through all of the recipes. I'm actually even shocked to see how much I have done with my freeze dryer in three years, not including all the food that we have actually already eaten through. If you wanna learn more about setting up the freeze dryer or my one-year journey, all the pros and cons of everything that I think about having a freeze dryer, definitely check out the videos below and I'll add them to the end of this one. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and happy preserving you guys.