The Ultimate Freeze-Drying FRUIT Collection - 1 Hour of How-To Videos

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this is the beginner's guide to how to freeze dry fruit for your home or your freeze drying business we're going to
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cover a lot of different topics the top five freeze-dried fruits that have sold the most for me as well as the tools
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that I've purchased that have made the preparation side very easy and smooth for the freeze drying process we're
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going to cover some of the equipment that I've bought as well as the freeze dryer settings that you're going to need
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for every single fruit that you freeze dry and stay tuned to the end of this video cuz I'm going to share with you the packaging methods that you should
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use once the freeze-dried fruit is all done hey welcome back to the freeze dried business Channel if you're new here my name is David and I run a freeze
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dried business in Idaho I've been running it for the past four years and I've learned a lot of different things
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from the cottage food side running it out of my home to also having a commercial kitchen where I have wholesale and have learned a lot of
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different things in the food processing methods so hit the Subscribe Bell if you want to follow me and follow more
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content related to freeze drying and specifically freeze drying as a business this is a huge Fun World of freeze
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drying and I think it's only going to grow even more so the more and more subscribers and community that we build
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here will benefit you all now today's video we're primarily going to cover what types of fruits I've seen
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successful in my freeze drying business and then some of the tools of best ways to kind of cut and prepare them and then
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the freeze dryer setting now the freeze Dryer's purpose is to extract the water from fruit but it's the purest form of
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keeping nutritional value in a food preservation method that's why the freeze drying industry is blowing up so
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much is because it's a great way to preserve your food and since the water is removed and then the fruit is dried
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at a high temperature now you're left with a way for you to crush the fruit flavor into a powder and that's why with
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the baking side of things now you can create a very flavorful type of cookie a flavorful cake or things like that that
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doesn't have that moist type of juice in it from the different fruits so that's why the application is very high with
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freeze-dried fruit now over the past 4 years of running my freeze drying business as of this video I found that
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there's been six different types of fruits that have been the best sellers for me and I've Tred different fruits
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but it really doesn't have the same take as these now the first one is blueberries I've got a video on how to
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freeze-dried blueberries we're going to do one tray of that today I've also found that strawberries have been a big
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seller I also would suggest you doing bananas and I also combine that to do a
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strawberry banana mix I've also had success with freeze drying apples as well as pineapple and raspberries now
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we're just going to do Apple strawberries and blueberries today just to keep it easy and simple now those are the six top freeze-dried fruits that
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I've been selling in my freeze drying business and I would suggest you try as well and then as you start finding what
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your customers like you can then pinpoint what you want to go for the most in terms of looking at having that
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as more of a consistent product to have now let's go over the tools that make these three fruits really easy to
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prepare now the blueberries I've got this roller Berry now this tool is
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something that I invested in it's it's quite expensive relative to other methods that you can use but this is the
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roller Berry it's a stainless steel rotating spinning type of poking tool
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and what it does is it's going to poke the skin of the blueberries and the reason you want to do that is because
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the skin of the blueberry keeps that water inside and so if you just put blueberries as is on the tray it
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actually will explode and I'm showing you a picture right now of what those blueberries that are exploded look like
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so if you want them to look presentable and not exploding I would suggest you find a method to be able to poke these
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blueberries now I've done it individually with a with a little uh skewer little needle uh which took a
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long time you can also use a meat tenderizer but this has just been always sturdy for me and you don't have to buy
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a bunch of them they don't break down but if you want to go the cheaper route I've got a video link in the description below of the meat tenderizers as well as
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the link to Frozen W who makes this roller Berry and this is a really easy tool that I'll show you how to use for
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the strawberries we want to use this egg slicer that's right it's an egg slicer
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and you're going to put the strawberries in here and then you just snap it shut and then it cuts it into four to five
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different slices and the reason you want to use a slicer like this is because it actually can shorten the amount of time
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for the freeze drying process because the thinner the slice the shorter amount of time the freeze dryer is going to
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take to actually get to the last molecule of moisture in the strawberries and that's why I like slicing the
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strawberries as well now with the apples what I use is this Big hunken Tool and
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the reason I've used this is because it's actually a potato fry slicer and I like the Fry type of look because it I
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don't know it just looks more snacky if that's even a word and I like using it
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because it's also very fast and effective so that's what I like using I also have used the KitchenAid Apple
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slicer as well as just cut it up by hand but we're going to use this today and this you can find in the video
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description it's a potato fry slicer now you're also going to want a great sharp knife something that doesn't dle too
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fast and I've used these Cutco types of knives and it's been a good investment because it never goes dull and I don't
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have to sharpen it that much now in my sink here to my left I've got a strainer so that way I can wash off all the fruit
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prior to preserving this now if you're in a commercial kitchen or you're preparing fruit for your customers you want to make sure that you have some
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gloves or you at least want to wash your hands in between handling different types of fruits because I'm in my
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kitchen right now in my home I'm just going to not wear gloves and it'll be a little bit messy but it's perfectly fine
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just because we're going to do this video These grates I bought off of Frozen r as well who makes the roller
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Berry these allow for some air flow when the drying process is kicked on into the
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freeze dryer they make these for the stay fresh as well as for the the Harvest Right freeze dryer trays from
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different sizes now I have the Harvest Right large freeze dryer and so these grates are for the large size trays and
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they fit perfectly inside the tray like this what I also like is these grates can easily be lifted out of the tray and
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then the fruit stays on top and then you can just dump it into your food safe bucket now if you don't own a freeze
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dryer you can always go to my affiliate link Down Below in the video description I own Harvest right as well as stay
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fresh freeze dryers both are great I would suggest the Harvest straight freeze dryer if you're starting a freeze
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drying business they have the largest freeze dryers right now for most affordable price for the highest
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capacity for example they have the XL freeze dryer that can do upwards of 40 lbs of food in one Cycle One cycle
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meaning you've got them all full full of fruit and so that's really nice compared to the large size which can do upwards
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of you know 16 lbs so it's over two times the amount of food that you can do just in one cycle and that really
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increases your bottom line in your freeze drying business because you want that freeze dryer running non-stop but
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also getting the most production out of it once you press start on that machine so that's what I would suggest and if
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you want to know more about freeze Dryers go ahead and click the link below in the video description and it'll tell
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you more about different reviews that I've made as well as you can check out the website directly let's get started
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with the blueberries first this container is 11 oz of blueberries I put two in my strainer wash them all and
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that's what we're going to put on the tray now you have to keep in mind when freeze drying is if you want to put as
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much capacity on a freeze drying tray as you want that's perfectly fine but just know that it's going to take a lot
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longer for the freeze dryer and it's processing its sensors to realize when it's all completely done so you could be
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looking at a very long dry time now today I've got a cutting board but typically what I have is one of the
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Harvest Right silicone mats that you put in your tray they make them for all different size freeze dryer trays now
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what that silicone mat allows you to do is just not have such of a hard surface when you're rolling using the roller
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Berry or you're using your meat tenderizer I just like having a a more soft cushion on there so we're going to
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take the blueberries out of the strainer and what I'm going to show you here is you just kind of line it up to the kind
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of the width of this roller Berry tool and I've just found that this just makes
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things a lot easier so you roll across and as you saw there it rolled and poked the blueberries now each blueberry has
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kind of like multiple different pokes so we put all those blueberries on the tray
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now the video footage I'm showing right now is not me right now it's actually of my other video on specifically how to
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freeze dry blueberries which you can take a look at in the video description or after this video I'll show it up in
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the thumbnails because this actually shows you a detailed look at how to use
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this roller Berry tool how quickly and efficient you can do it and now that we're done here 22 oz roughly of
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blueberries is this is a great amount because we don't have doubling up of volume on the tray so it's going to
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actually reduce our freeze drying time now that we're done with this what I'm going to show you is these tray stackers
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and if you don't own tray stackers they literally fit right on the edges of
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these trays a lot of people make these but I like buying from us made only so
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I've got a link to the video description below of Freez dryings supplies.com as well as links to Amazon with sofo
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survival who makes these in America and and they're 3D printed but they fit
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perfectly and I've got a bunch of these so that I can quickly prep and speaking of preparation when you have a large
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amount of fruit that you're getting ready to prepare because maybe you got a good deal on it you want to use that
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time effectively and so using these tray stackers you're going to do a ton of blueberries or a ton of strawberries
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when they're in season and that way you can put these in your freezer and the reason you're going to prefreeze is
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because it reduces the amount of time that you're having to prepare every single time you want to put something into the freeze dryer so if I've got 10
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trays worth which is two cycles worth of freeze drying now I can prepare 10 trays
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worth of fruit I'm putting it into the freezer then it's all Frozen I take out
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five put them into the freeze dryer my large freeze dryer and then when that's done I've already got some already
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prepped and in the freezer that I can just put them in again so it makes it just more of an easier process and
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that's the thing to know as a beginner is you want to make things easy for yourself and especially when you get
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into the seasonal side of purchasing fruit you want to maximize the amount of fruit that you're going to buy and
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therefore prep it all at one time now that we're done with the blueberries let's move on to strawberries for the strawberries the tools you need is
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obviously a knife to cut off the stems and then if you're going to slice them you're going to use this egg slicer and
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I've got a link in the video description below to Amazon it's not more than 10 to $2 for one of these now I have in my
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strainer that I wash you want to make sure you wash strawberry really well because of all those pesticides that can really soak in where the seeds are I
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bought 2 lb this is 2 lb of strawberries one pound from the container and that's
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about how much strawberries I'm going to put on the tray that's sliced again I've got a grate now in this tray and as you
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can see here's my blueberries underneath and then I've got the tray stackers and it sets right on top of here it's very
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easy so we're going to cut the stems off of the strawberries and what I do is I put the
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strawberries right there that have the stems off and I put the stems in here what we're going to do with the stems is
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we're going to freeze dry them as well on another tray and reason being is because there's a lot of value in the
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healthiness of the strawberry stems I typically have always thrown away the
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stems but I've been reading a lot more about the healthiness of the stems and
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I'm going to put up a little bit of information about the healthiness of the strawberries right now so that you can
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see why you should probably keep the stems and freeze dry them the leaves um
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there's a lot of value in that and when you're freeze drying the whole point is to preserve food and not have anything
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go to waste so that's what we're going to do is we're going to put the stems on
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one tray as its own and have the sliced strawberries right here now typically on
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a large tray that I have for this Harvest Right freeze dryer I really only put about 2 lbs of strawberries on the
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tray that are sliced because anything else would be kind of an overload okay so now that we got those sliced let's go
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ahead and grab our egg slicer we're just putting it right on the grooves where the slicer
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are and then we're pressing down and it's cutting sometimes it sticks like this but it's cutting them into perfect
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slices the thinner the slice the more it's going to allow those freeze dryer sensors to notice that there's less
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water molecules in it for it to get it completely dry cuz if you left it full
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which I've seen people do that's perfectly fine but think about how long it's going to take for the sensors to
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sense that the that there's no moisture inside the very core of this in the middle just going to take a lot longer
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so I like to keep things simple and also just makes a better snack uh when you're
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selling it in your freeze dryer bag as you can see here this is 2 lb of St
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strawberries all cut up all right so as you can see we're going to put more tray stackers four to a tray and now we can
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put another tray on top for our apples that we'll do next
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all right moving on to Apples now again you can choose to slice up apples any way you want to what I've chosen to use
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is a potato slicer this is a really sturdy potato slicer it has suction cups
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that can attach to your counter no matter where you are and then you're simply going to put the Apple into the
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little slider area right here and when this slides through you can put the tray
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right below it and when you press forward it slices it perfectly into these apple slices and now what you're
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seeing me do here is I'm just removing the kind of the core Pieces Just because at least for me I don't really like the
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core pieces when I eat an apple but I'm going to take those out so that the the seeds and the core part doesn't get
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freeze-dried because again I'm selling this to customers I'm not doing it for my own use customers are going to be
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different than what you're going to use freeze-dried fruit for right so you want something that's going to be presentable
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that looks nice and it's not just something that you know came out of your own home right you want something to
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look presentable all right so now we're done with slicing up the apples that was really quick now this is five Gayla
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apples on one tray this is a perfect amount now so that these don't Brown up
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too much I immediately put them in the freezer if you want you could maybe sprinkle spr Le over some lemon juice or
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something like that that's what I've seen do it but I just don't like the The Taste or kind of the smell of it so what
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I do is I just quickly actually put these in the freezer three different fruits all stacked together and this is
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why I use the tray stackers and then we're going to put two more trays worth of fruit on top of here and that is how
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you prepare apples strawberries and blueberries now let's get to the packaging and the freeze dryer settings
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if you're liking the content you're liking freeze drying fruit hit the like button right now this is really going to help the video come up more in YouTube
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and on Google for future people who are looking to freeze dry fruit I'd really appreciate it and once again hit the
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Subscribe Bell if you're not a subscriber already I'd love for you to join the freeze drying business Community now once you're done with
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prefreezing your fruit or if you just want to pop it in right away you're going to make sure that the freeze dryer
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is at 125° fah for freeze drying the fruit now
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what you do want to customize is the final dry time and I would set that at a minimum of 6 hour that just gives you
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more peace of mind that it's drying at a high temperature and getting all that water out now typically people ask
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what's the typical time frame for how long it's going to take for freeze-dried fruit that's all going to vary on how
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much fruit and product you're putting on the tray but generally if I'm going to do all five trays of my large Harvest
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Right freeze dryer with 2 lbs of strawberries to start with that's 10 lb
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total of freeze-dried strawberries and that 10 lb is typically going to take about 36 6 to 40 hours to freeze dry
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completely now let's talk about the packaging size so once you have the freeze-dried fruit done you're going to take it out and put it in some food
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grade type buckets and I've got some information below about those buckets and I also did a short about what type
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of buckets I use now again go to the video description below and you'll check out the eight commonly almost asked questions about packaging and that's
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where I share what type of buckets I use now the three things that are going to impact your freeze-dried fruit from going bad or soft is sunlight moisture
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and oxygen and so it should be dry so you don't have to worry about the moisture unless you're in a high
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humidity area and that's when you'd want to be careful about where you're storing the free- dried fruit but let's just talk about the other two factors
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sunlight and oxygen so with sunlight if you're using bags like I have with my
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freeze drying business this has a window on it so if it's going to be exposed to any type of sunlight that is going to
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impact the color of the freeze-dried fruit over time as well as it's going to impact the freshness of it as well
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typically try to get these sold within about 3 to 4 months using these craft
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bags and I've got a link in the video description where I get these bags off of Amazon but if you're going to use something else that has Windows just
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remember the sunlight is going to impact that now the third factor is the oxygen side that's when you're going to want to use oxygen absorbers to put into the bag
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now there's a lot of different debate and information about what type of size oxygen absorbers you should have but
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generally you want to go with probably a 300cc oxygen absorber and one video I
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love that talks about this is on the live life simple YouTube he's got a great video that I'm going to link in
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the video description that talks specifically about oxygen absorbers and he goes through all the science as well
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as what type of sizes to use and all that type of thing so I'm not going to go through that but you would want to
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use an auction absorber for your freeze-dried fruit no matter whether you have a myar bag that doesn't have a window or one that does okay hey welcome
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to the freeze Drive business Channel my name is David if you are running a freeze dry business or you're looking at starting one or you're even just
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interested in what freeze drying is all about this Channel and this video is for you because I'm going to show you one of
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my top tools that I use for cutting fruit specifically bananas I'm going to freeze dry the bananas I'm going to use
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the tool and this tool is going to save you time and money it's very affordable it's very easy to use and it's saved me
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an immense amount of time prepping bananas so let's get started with this video and I'll share with you all about it
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[Music] hey welcome back to another video on the freeze dried business Channel my name is David and I run a freeze dried business
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in Idaho I started this channel because I wanted to document in video form ways to help a freeze-dried business whether
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it's beginning or whether it's been going on for a long time and it can continue to grow and because when I
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started my Freeze Drive business in 2020 I didn't have any of that video helpful
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tools and tips available so this is why I started that channel so if this is something that you're interested in
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welcome now in this video we're going to do a couple things I'm going to show you how to freeze dry bananas using a tool
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to slice all the bananas very quickly it's a tool that I found off of Amazon
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and it's very affordable it's very easy to use what I like about this tool is that it slices the bananas in the same
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depth on every single slice so you have kind of the same type of Slice on your
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trays and as well as available for you to sell to your customers now if you're not familiar with the health benefits of
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bananas let me just give you a couple highlights as to why I freeze dry bananas now bananas are very high in
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potassium which we all very much know about right but the potassium is actually really good for our heart as
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well as our blood pressure now also bananas are very good for energy without
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having the fats and the cholesterol in it also bananas help with ingestion issues as well three very good values
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for bringing bananas to your customers as a healthy alternative in your business now hey if you're already
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getting excited about this video and be sharing this tool go ahead and hit the like button on this video I'd appreciate
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it all right let's go ahead and get started on looking at the bananas and this [Music]
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tool all right so what is this great tool that slices bananas and is super fast easy to use and affordable it's the
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fire Kiln banana slicer now I bought this off of Amazon it's only $10 and
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basically you can use your hand very easy it doesn't take very much strength you're going to put the banana right
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through this hole and then slice and there's basically about six different types of uh slice marks or slice areas
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for the banana to slice through so what I really like about this tool is that basically every single slice of the
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banana is the same amount thickness so you don't have one that's too thick not
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ones that too thin and that's what I really like about this tool and it's only 10 bucks so if you're interested in
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buying this after seeing this go ahead and go into the video description and use my affiliate link which I have this
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directly to Amazon now what we're going to do next is I'm going to peel all these bananas I'm going to slice them
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using the banana slicer and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put them all on trays with freezer paper and I'm
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going to put them into the freezer to pre-freeze so I can get them into the freeze dryer [Music]
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later all right so let's go ahead and get started with prepping these bananas now I like to wear food safe gloves
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these rubber gloves and um that's just because there's just a lot of stickiness
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and stuff that is on the bananas once you open them up so I just don't like having that as as I'm trying to do this
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as quickly as possible now really this is the simplest type of fruit you're going to find outside of even maybe
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blueberries or raspberries things like that that you can just throw on the tray but with bananas uh what I really like
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is that you don't have to kind of wash it right so all we're going to do is we're going to peel the banana and then
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we're going to put four on here and then we'll see if we need to put even any
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more bananas on there so I'm going to peel these first I left that which that
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wasn't intentional but uh yeah bananas are are really great now you can use
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bananas um I do a a strawberries freeze-dried strawberries and bananas
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mix uh which I started doing this year and it's really caught on my wholesale
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customers really like it I also uh really find that people are liking it um
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at uh some on my website things like that all right so I've got the four bananas now this is how slick it is and
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I'm going to zoom in so you can see but basically you can slice it and it slices directly onto this freezer paper now
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this is Reynold's freezer paper and again I I have the blades going up so
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that way the bananas fall down onto the paper like this and really all you're going to do is I'm going to zoom in like
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this because here's the bananas right and I just put it so that it get creates an
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even amount and I'm just going right to the end and I've got this banana already
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sliced it's all the same thickness which I really like now when you're
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prefreezing the bananas um what I found is if you if you don't mind having
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clumps of the bananas then that's you don't have to worry about this but sometimes I like just having
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the individual pieces of bananas in my bags after they're done freeze drying
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and once these are frozen then it's much easier for once they start freeze drying
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they're not going to stick together as much and I like the individual pieces
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because when they're in clumps just present presentation wise and maybe just think of yourself as a consumer you may
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not want to have you know six bananas at once you just kind of want to have them as snack bites so that's why I kind of
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like arranging them like this it's a little bit more tedious um and I know I do really stress efficiency with having
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a freeze dry business because you know you want to be really quick at time as
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money right so I'm just arranging these as you can see in a line that way when
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they freeze they're not freezing together or anything and as you can see this is probably actually going to be
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the perfect amount and again look how quick this is this tool $10 all right
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one more banana let's go ahead and get this
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[Music] sliced all right so that's this is the fourth banana that I sliced and as you
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can see I'm just trying to arrange it so that there's just not too much layers on top of it I'm not going to do this for
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everyone um normally what I do with these bananas is I'll probably have a couple of trays worth of all of them
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kind of single file and they're not layered up like this and that way I just kind of have a good mixture versus if I
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have a lot of bananas that I'm doing then I'm just going to layer them up and that way I just get the most on a tray
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to be able to then put in the freezer so that's how quick this tray is let's do one more tray and I'll show you again
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how quick it is but I'm going to do it in my own speed so you can see how quickly one tray can get
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[Music] done all right so I'm going to set a TI
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timer on my phone we're going to see how fast we can get these bananas done
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because I just love seeing how fast you can get it done when you're using a tool like this so um I'm going to basically
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go from peeling to then slicing and then once I feel like I'm done with all of it
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I'll press stop on the stop one on your mark get set all right let's go David [Music]
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all right and stop all right how fast should we do that at my hands are really
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gross with banana stuff but 1 minute and almost 7 seconds 1 minute and 7 Seconds
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that is awesome how many trays of bananas can you do well if you're going to do five trays where worth and you're
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going to do five bananas on each tray well that's only 5 minutes of prep work
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that's not bad hey if you like how F I did those bananas give it a thumbs up on this video I'd appreciate
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[Music] it all right it's the next day the
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bananas are all Frozen into the freezer but we need to get the freeze dryer set up so I'm going to just let you know
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that when I set up the freeze dryer for fruit I typically just stick with the factory settings which is 125°
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I do customize the final dry time just based on kind of what the Time of the
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Season is now if it's really hot and humid and summertime like it is here in Idaho definitely make sure that uh it's
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drying appropriately and so in the winter time man the the machine just
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does really well and I don't really don't have to worry about that so what I'm going to set it to is an extra final dry time of 6
27:54
hours and I'm going to press save and so that's what the free dryer at is 125°
28:00
and so now we got to wait 15 minutes for it to cool down I do wait until the
28:05
temperature gets to around 45° before putting it into the freeze dryer because
28:10
it is going to get down to that 30° but that way there's not too much time in between me taking out the freezer and
28:16
any type of dethaw or anything and that way it's at 45° and then it just has a little bit more to go to under 32 now
28:23
once the freeze dryer gets to that 45° or less I'm going to take the Frozen banan move them over to my uh working
28:30
tray area that's right below me and I'll put the frozen bananas onto the Harvest
28:36
Right trays put them into the freeze dryer close the drain valve and then we'll start the cycle I'm expecting that
28:42
the bananas are going to take probably between 36 to 42 hours that's typically what this machine takes in terms of the
28:49
length of time to dry now it might take longer than that just based on the final dry time and once the Cycle's done I'll
28:55
show you what the freeze-dried bananas look like what they tastes like and then I'll have some closing remarks on
29:00
bananas now before I leave hey hit that like button on this video if you like the content so far also take a look at
29:07
my other videos if you haven't already we'll see you after the cycle gets [Music]
29:14
done all right the freeze dried cycle is done the bananas are done it ran for about 38 hours so I'm going to get these
29:21
freeze Dy bananas out of the freeze dryer and then we're going to see what it looks like as the end result for you
29:26
all right so this is what a freeze dry banana looks like uh it actually retains the same amount of shape and everything
29:33
now I'm going to put the camera so you can kind of see what the freeze-dried bananas look
29:39
like so this is one of the trays of the freeze-dried bananas so as you can see
29:45
and you can hear that they just are super kind of just crunchy now when you
29:51
break them apart they just snap off and they're super crunchy have a lot of
29:58
flavor definitely some banana aftertaste but these are great to put in for strawberries like a strawberry banana
30:04
mix also just great for snacking my kids love them so I think marketing them as
30:10
just really good healthy snacks like I said they're high in potassium great for your heart great for into digestion
30:17
issues things like that so um these are these freeze dry Banas are great took about 38 hours all right just a recap on
30:24
freeze drying bananas now the settings for your freeze dryer just the factory settings I set it at
30:30
125° I did add final dry time to about 6 hours 5 or 6 hours or so you don't have
30:36
to do that much but I always just kind of add more final dry time just for just to be safe to make sure it's completely
30:43
dry and it ran for about 38 hours and we did about 12 to 13 lbs of bananas now I
30:50
use that fire kill banana slicer you can get it off of Amazon for 10 bucks it's really cheap the link to that on Amazon
30:56
is in the video description hey thanks a lot for joining me if you could do one thing after watching this is hit the like button on this video I'd really
31:03
appreciate it it helps me just kind of gauge to see whether people are liking the content that I'm putting out there as well as hit the Subscribe button
31:10
that'll get more and more of my videos into your feed for YouTube as well as notifying you when I put out a new video
31:16
you'll see that new video right and directly in your feed so you can take it all in hey have a great rest of the week
31:21
and we'll see you again next time on the freeze Drive business Channel go out and make a difference in your community cheers
31:28
[Music] hey if you've got a freeze dryer like the one behind me and you're trying to
31:33
freeze dry blueberries but you just can't get the drying process correctly and they all come out inconsistent
31:39
you're going to love this video because I've got a tool that's going to save you time and money by poking the skin of the
31:44
blueberry it's fantastic and I'm going to show you what it's all about in this [Music]
31:52
video hi I'm David and I'm a freeze dry business owner in Idaho if you are an owner of freeze dry business bus or
31:58
you're trying to start one this channel is for you I started this channel because I just couldn't find any visual
32:04
video representation of what it's like to freeze dry as a business or to find just videos about how to do different
32:09
things that can help you in a freeze dry business so I started this Channel and all the videos that I'm producing is to
32:14
help you wherever you're at in your business in today's video we're going to freeze dry blueberries and I'm going to
32:20
show you how to use a tool that's really helped me be efficient with doing blueberries one of the most frustrating
32:26
fruits for me starting out was the blueberry and the reason being is because I used to just throw the
32:32
blueberries right on the tray and I didn't realize that you needed to poke the skin of the blueberry and any other
32:39
types of fruits that have a skin because as you know the freeze dryer is removing the moisture from any type of item so
32:47
with the blueberry the skin preserves that kind of like compactness water
32:52
activity in there and so if it just dries it doesn't have a way to release the water and then you get exploding
32:59
blueberries that are dried and it just either falls apart and crumbles or it
33:05
becomes still chewing and it doesn't dry completely that's the inconsistencies that I found so I started poking
33:11
blueberries with an individual metal skewer and I started just poking each individual one on the trays it took a
33:18
really long time and it just wasn't efficient now I purchased the roller Berry and this is by the company Frozen
33:25
right the company manufactures a stainless steel roller Berry now the
33:30
tool has metal spokes that rotate and then right here is where all the
33:35
blueberries catch once you roll it and it falls right back on the tray now the
33:40
roller Berry tool and then this case that comes with Styrofoam in it to keep
33:46
the stainless steel tool intact that's going to run you about $190 if you just want the roller Berry
33:53
it's going to run you 160 now it pays for itself I love this tool I'm definitely an ambassador of this tool
34:00
because it's saved me a lot of time and money all right first things is we need to wash the blueberries now if you're
34:06
not familiar with washing methods I did look up on the USDA and you really don't
34:11
have to wash fruit in any specific way you just need to run it over cold water
34:17
and I usually run it for about a minute or so so what I use is a strainer like this and then I'm just going to use
34:24
running water and then cold water and then I use the sprayer to rinse over the
34:33
blueberries and then what I do is I usually just take my hands and I kind of turn over the blueberries a little bit
34:40
so that we get the ones that were at the bottom anytime you're freeze drying fruit you should definitely be washing
34:45
the fruit beforehand so again I'm just making sure I'm getting all of any type of dirt or bacteria that came off the
34:52
blueberries from the store off of there so that's probably good all right we're going to use the roller I'm going to
34:58
show you how quickly it is to poke blueberries I've got the blueberries all washed and what we're going to do is we
35:04
just kind of line up the blueberries using the silicone mat from the Harvest
35:09
Right trays and we simply put the roller Berry on the end we kind of tilt up like this and then we roll and look every
35:16
every single one of these blueberries just got poked which is brilliant so then we can just toss those in here onto
35:23
the other tray and get more blueberries I've got
35:29
one Harvest tray over here and then I've got this one with a silicone mat and this was about 3 lb of
35:36
blueberries that I washed and I usually do about 3 lb on
35:43
one tray of blueberries I haven't noticed any really bad consistencies with putting 3 lb
35:51
versus putting two lbs of blueberries again you just kind of lift up and you roll it all across this is super
35:59
efficient to get these blueberries skins all poked so blueberries are very
36:05
popular for me because they're kind of just very snacky they're small they
36:10
taste like the blueberries and they're crunchy I find that people really buy these because one if you like blueberries you're going to like these
36:17
like I said they're crunchy they kind of people like crunchiness they like having pretzels they like having you know corn
36:25
chips and things like that andn cor nuts blueberries kind of provide that crunchiness and it's awesome and then it
36:32
also it's freeze-dried so it's preserved freeze-dried blueberries provides that stability for fresh produce so I just
36:40
did 3 lbs of blueberries this whole tray right here 3 lb of
36:47
blueberries this took only about 5 minutes using the roller Berry all poked
36:53
and everything all right I'm going to set a timer for how long it takes me to do 2 lb of blueberry so you can see
37:00
let's go ahead and press start and let's do the roller Berry
37:05
[Music]
37:38
okay 2 minutes and 14 seconds to do 2 lbs of blueberries all poked in all
37:44
awesome all right I just washed 2 lbs of blueberries and I'm going to do it without it being poked so that you can
37:51
see the difference once these are all done of what the difference is with the
37:56
blueberries if they're not poked versus if they are all right I want to give you some perspective on the tray loads
38:03
because this is two lb of blueberries that are poked and then this is 3 lb of
38:11
blueberries that are poked so it's a little bit taller as you can see and definitely has more of a layer to it
38:18
we're going to see how both of these dry and what the differences in consistency
38:23
is of the dry when they're more overloaded versus when they are just a more single layer like 2 lb versus 3 lb
38:32
so I have a Harvest Right large freeze dryer and I don't change any of the default settings that come with it for
38:38
fruit specifically I keep everything the same except for maybe the final dry time
38:43
you can change that however long you want it to be extra dry usually when it's on that final dry process I'm right
38:50
by the machine and if I want more time I'll add it so in the freeze dryer that we're going to do for this cycle is 12
38:56
lb of blueberry we' also got a couple of trays that don't have any poking to it of the skin so we're going to see how
39:02
that does and then we've got a tray that has 3 lb on it versus 2 lbs so a lot of fun stuff to kind of see how it all
39:09
turns out we'll wait for this cycle to get done and then we'll see how it all turned out all right blueberries are
39:14
done so with that 12 lbs of blueberries it took around 47 hours now I'm warming
39:21
the trays up just so it can get a little bit more uh warmer I just wasn't able to get it here earlier in the day so we're
39:28
just going to warm up the trays and then we'll take a look at the blueberries blueberries are done they're done freeze drying and so what I'm going to show you
39:35
is the various different trays now if you recall we did some with the roller Berry where we poked the skin we wanted
39:41
to release the moisture out of the berry and then we also did a couple trays with different pounds so we did one tray with
39:48
two lbs one tray with three so let's take a look at those trays all right everybody I just took two trays out of
39:54
the freeze dryer one tray is poked that's the one that's poked that we did
39:59
with the roller Berry and then this one is not and as you can see quite a big difference so this is the tray that we
40:05
didn't poke the skin and remember the reason we poking the skin is because there's moisture inside these
40:11
blueberries obviously and when they have a skin or most berries that have a skin
40:16
basically there's no way for that moisture to release so unlike other fruits there is a way for that water to
40:21
release but with blueberries there's a skin so again this is the tray that as you can see it it just
40:28
has this red and it actually like crushes you see all that how it's crushing with just my finger it's just
40:36
really poor quality in terms of the overall product now take a look at this
40:42
tray now this is the tray that we poked as you can see there's barely any type of juices that were released maybe one
40:49
or two from ones we just didn't get enough poking on this blueberry doesn't really Crush at all and even if it does
40:55
it still stays intact and you get that really crispy crunch now the reason you're hearing that popping is because I
41:00
just came out of the freeze dryer so again here's the two trays this tray that has then poked you really get a
41:07
really nice blueberry okay so now what I'm showing you is the two trays that were poked but one of them had 3 lb
41:16
that's this one right here it's a little bit overloaded and then this one has just 2 lb of blueberries that are poked
41:24
with the roller Berry and as we can see with this 3 lb one let's dig down into
41:29
the kind of the middle and see if it's dry
41:36
yep it's good product hey I wanted to show you one more tray this is a tray that we didn't poke and I wanted to show
41:44
you just look at look at how some of these blueberries turned out shriveled up and things it just very inconsistent
41:49
still has some moisture in it also the blueberries that are shriveled up that you see have moisture in them so if you
41:55
just throw them in a bag or throw them them in your bucket for storage it's really going to spoil all your freeze-dried blueberries that were
42:02
already dried okay so if you're wondering what blueberries taste like freeze-dried a freeze-dried blueberry
42:08
when it's poked and it's done perfectly it's super crunchy over the past 3 years of doing
42:15
freeze drying I feel like freeze drying for fruit and other types of things even candy the flavor for certain things just
42:23
hits more quickly than others which I really like right so one thing about freeze drying that you should definitely
42:29
know about is you're going to want to store your freeze-dried fruit and what I use for kind of temporary storage until
42:36
I'm ready to bag it is I use a 5 gallon bucket that has a gamma seal lid on it
42:41
which is kind of an airtight type of lid so I'm going to show you that and then we're going to put the berries that I
42:47
poked in there and we're going to kind of probably discard the ones that I didn't poke or kind of use them in maybe
42:53
some other ways all right so here's the 5 gallon bucket and this is what they call the gamma seal lid I've got a link
43:00
in the description of this video if you want to buy it off of Amazon but it has this rubber gasket as you can see here
43:07
and that's what creates that seal and then it has a really good amount of spin
43:12
to it and then you just tighten it up and what I usually do is I put some desicant packets down here to just
43:19
absorb any type of moisture or anything I'm not too concerned with air at this point because it's so just so shortterm
43:25
right now of using the bucket so I'm going to dump the
43:31
blueberries in here that that I poked with the roller
43:38
Berry and I already had some blueberries in there which is totally fine I did
43:43
actually have a big wholesale order for blueberries this past Christmas usually
43:49
my bags that I put together I have a net weight of 1.2 oz of blueberries that I
43:55
sell and I was able to get about 60 bags if I filled this up to the top 60 bags
44:01
of blueberries at 1.2 net ounz then we're just going to seal it back
44:07
up all right and then we're done hey it was a blast doing freeze dry blueberries I hope the roller Berry and poking the
44:14
skin of the blueberries made sense for you remember we just want to poke them for purely to release the moisture out
44:20
of the blueberries because the skin provides that kind of compact pressure
44:25
that's not going to give you the best crunch and the most highquality product and that's what it's really all about when it comes to freeze drying if you
44:31
want to purchase the roller Berry go ahead and go to frozen.com let them know that David from the Freez dried business
44:38
Channel sent you also you can subscribe to this Channel or like this video if it was helpful for your business hey have a
44:44
great day and make an impact to your community using your business we'll see you next
44:52
time this is the beginner's guide how to freeze dry tropical fruit we're going to cover everything from from the tools
44:57
that you need to cut all the different fruit that we're going to cover in this video as well as freeze drying tools and
45:03
equipment that'll make your life a lot easier to prepare fruit and sell it in your freeze drying business before we
45:10
prepare the fruits that are in front of me I just want to encourage you to subscribe to this channel if you're interested in freeze drying this is a
45:16
unique Channel where we talk about things not only revolving around freeze drying but freeze drying as a business
45:21
so if you're interested in using your freeze dryer to make some side income or grow it to a full-time business these
45:27
are the types of videos that I'm going to be putting out on this channel so make sure you subscribe hit the Bell notification as well because that'll
45:34
actually trigger different notifications for when a new video comes out just like this one one thing I love about the
45:39
freeze drying industry is that there's so many different things to try now there's Facebook groups there's my videos there's other people's videos on
45:46
YouTube that you can watch but I wanted to cover five different tropical fruits that one I've been trying to do in my
45:52
freeze dry business but I also wanted to see how it freeze dried because I haven't done these in in the past now I
45:57
did a video recently on other types of fruits that you can check out in the video card above or at the end of this
46:03
video I've always got also links to previous videos in the video description that you can check out I've also got
46:08
some new freeze drying equipment from freeze drying supplies.com if you haven't checked them out I'm going to be
46:15
a new affiliate for them and that just means that I'm going to be promoting their products a little bit more because
46:20
I see a lot of value in what they're putting together and they're americanmade now maybe you're familiar
46:25
with the fruits that are in front of me but if you're not this is what we're going to be doing today we're going to be doing five different types of fruits because I've
46:31
got a large Harvest Right freeze dryer and so we're going to put each fruit on one tray this fruit right here papaya
46:38
now I don't typically eat papayas but I know it's very valuable in antioxidants
46:44
we're also going to cover how to freeze dry dragon fruit it's actually really expensive in an area like where I am
46:50
which is an Idaho so these cost about $3 each so we'll freeze dry these because it is a tropical fruit I've also got
46:57
kiwis my sons love kiwis so we're going to peel these and prepare them on the freeze dryer trays we also got mangoes
47:05
I've got a special tool that I bought off of Amazon to peel these and get the fruit out of here and then we've of
47:11
course got pineapple now why is tropical fruit important for you in your freeze
47:17
drying business well it adds a lot of variety to things that other people maybe aren't doing freeze drying fruit
47:23
takes a long time to freeze dry it typically takes 36 to 48 hours to do a full cycle of 10 to 16 lbs in your large
47:32
Harvest freeze if you've got a medium same type of thing so it takes a lot longer than candy but the benefit is
47:38
that fruit retains 94% of its nutritional value after freeze drying
47:44
that's because of the sublimation process that the freeze dryer is doing for you so it's taking all the water out
47:50
of the fruit but it's through the vacuum process it's kind of extracting water as
47:56
a vapor and then it's kind of drying it and then ever so slightly kind of going back and forth so you're left with kind
48:02
of basically the same looking feel of the fruit but the value is still there because it's not draining it all of its
48:08
nutrients like a dehydrator would before we start cutting the fruit we will be talking about the freeze dryer settings
48:14
that I'm going to be putting into my Harvest Right freeze dryer towards the end of this video so make sure you stay
48:19
tuned also right now hit that like button if you love freeze drying and you love seeing freeze drying different
48:25
types of fruits thanks a lot let's get to The Cutting starting out with pineapple this is what we use for cing
48:30
the pineapple it is a pineapple core it's 12 15 bucks it's on Amazon you can find a link in the video description
48:37
below now moving on to mangoes I've got a particular tool for taking the pit out
48:42
of a mango it's not a normal pit that you're used to seeing in like cherries and peaches things like that no the
48:49
mango pit is flat so you actually have to peel the fresh fruit around the pit
48:55
before you do that and one of the tools that you can use is this mango deit slicer type thing this is not very
49:02
expensive at all either it's on Amazon go to the video description I've got a link there and you're simply going to
49:07
press down and it goes right down the middle of the mango and we'll slice
49:12
through that and I'll share with you once we prepare the mango how that happens and the last three remaining fruit for kiwi papaya and dragon fruit
49:19
we're simply just going to use a knife I use these all the time around our kitchen it's just the qar type of knife set has different sizes if you you don't
49:26
have a knife set or if you want to go buy a really nice one from Cutco something like that I haven't had any
49:32
problems with these and my wife and I have been married for 10 years got these for our wedding so it's lasted a long
49:37
time you can sharpen these you can do whatever but get a good set of knives when you're preparing fruit I've also
49:43
got this Cutco smaller type of knife I love these for strawberri smaller types
49:48
of fruits I'm going to use them on the Kiwi so if you don't have a sharp knife and you don't have a cut coat knife this
49:54
is really nice to have and I've got some links in the video description below to Amazon and other links so that you can
49:59
buy these knives directly and if you have Amazon Prime you're going to get these in about a day or two so very
50:05
quickly to be able to get things that you need for your freeze drying business hey if you're looking for a freeze dryer
50:10
there's a couple of brands that I recommend I personally own Harvest right I've owned several different large
50:16
freeze jyes and I still own them today highly recommended and if you're going to started freeze drying business I'd
50:22
recommend the XL freeze dryer as well as looking at the HRC 100 which can do up to 100 lb of product that one I would
50:29
prefer if you have four or five XLS in your business and you're really looking at trying to decide what your next
50:35
purchase is going to be that HRC 100 might be a benefit and I'll include a link in the video description to harvest
50:41
commercial.com I do own stay fresh I own the original medium in between kind of
50:47
the large Harvest R freeze dryer for stay fresh it's been a beast of a machine I love that machine and uh I use
50:54
it for my free drying business too i' recommend stay fresh I've got a link to purchase that in the video description
50:59
as well now I have talked to the owners of blue Alpine seems like a great freeze dryer they're built locally here in
51:06
Idaho uh out in Idaho falls and they are trying to be the first kind of us made
51:13
freeze dryer now they do buy some components I believe out of the country but they assemble it and make it all in
51:19
Idaho which is pretty awesome so if you want to check those three freeze dryers out hit the video description and you'll see all the links to those now what
51:26
we're going to do with the pineapple again is we're going to take that pineapple core right little area that has the jagged edges we're going to put
51:32
that right on top where we see the core push down and then we're simply going to
51:38
turn this core this is how easy it is it doesn't take a whole lot of strength to do once you start hearing it kind of
51:45
like cutting in a in a non soft rougher way that's when you know it's down at
51:52
the very bottom and it pulls out the entire pineapple we're simply going to press down on our slicer and get all of
51:59
our nice little pieces now here's my Harvest State large freeze dryer tray
52:04
and what I've got is some parchment paper that I got from Freez dryings supplies.com now you can get parchment
52:10
paper wherever I do like supporting Brian over there he's got a bunch of different freeze drying supplies and
52:16
I've also got some freeze drying Lids right behind me that I'm going to share with you that we're going to stack the
52:22
trays on top of and then we're going to prefreeze before we put it in the freeze dryer all this fruit so the parchment
52:27
paper helps with just one cleanliness you don't have as much residue on the
52:33
actual tray which makes cleaning up easier but also it does come off of the
52:38
parchment paper easily once it's actually done with the freeze drying process I'm going to arrange the
52:45
pineapple where there's no stacking of slices the reason I'm going to do that is because it's just going to be easier
52:52
for the freeze dryer sensors everything is going to be able to sense that there's only a single layer and there's
52:59
not too much product um I don't consider myself an expert in freeze drying but I have done a lot of experimenting that I
53:05
kind of have figured out what I'm failing at and what has worked best we're going to go over to my little tray
53:11
area for my home and find these tray stackers as you can see this fits exactly on the large tray it snaps on
53:20
each end and what's fortunate about this is it already has the tray stackers for
53:26
another tray now this right here is not something that you would put in your freeze dryer this is purely just to not
53:32
have any freezer burn or not have anything kind of exposing the fruit when
53:38
you're actually pre-freezing your fruit so we're going to grab another Harvest St large freeze dryer tray snaps there
53:45
and then we're going to put another parchment paper right on top of here and start doing another type of fruit now he
53:50
makes all different sizes of these tray lids and parchment paper so no matter
53:56
what size you have even if you have a stay fresh machine blue Alpine the cube
54:01
he's building all these different things for those different types of freeze dryer so take a look all right so let's get started with the mango so again this
54:08
detaches this is the base and then you have the thing that's actually going to depit the the mango so what we're going
54:15
to do is we're going to put the mango like this right inside the center and we simply slide down the riper the mango is
54:22
obviously the the more smooth it is going to go down but as you can see here's the flat areaa of where the pit
54:29
is but we'll toss that aside for now and what you're left with with this mango two fresh pieces of fruit which is
54:36
awesome okay and just cut these very thin again the reason you're cutting them
54:42
thin is the length of time that that freeze dryer cuz it has sensors right
54:48
it's sensing what type of moisture content is in this fruit it could take a long time if you don't uh if you don't
54:55
cut these thin but again let's deit it see how quickly that was what I'm
55:00
doing is I'm just I'm taking this just like I would like an orange or an apple
55:06
and just taking the skin off because I want to do two different types of methods with the mango because I really
55:12
just don't do this very much I'm going to cut these thin again this half I'm cutting in thin
55:20
slices like this the next half I'm going to cut in kind of bigger chunks like
55:25
maybe like cubes see that right there so we've got that all on this tray
55:32
right here so that is the mango hey if you're loving the video right now about how to freeze dry tropical fruit would
55:37
you give this video a thumbs up right now it's just going to really help the algorithm on YouTube YouTube loves to
55:43
see people engaging through comments and likes things like that so if you can do that for me that'd be great this video
55:49
will reach more and more people who want to freeze dry tropical fruits just like this all right let's get started with dragon fruit I've never done this before
55:55
but I've watched a couple videos on how to actually peel the dragon fruit apart
56:01
that type of thing also I interviewed a freeze dryer entrepreneur down in Panama
56:06
his name is Eric and he runs the YouTube channel called two guys in a cooler if you want to check out that interview
56:12
with him he is awesome and he's got a lot of great videos as well that video can be found in the thumbnail as well as
56:19
up above here in the card if you want to check out that video but he recommended doing dragon fruit and down there in
56:24
Panama theyve got all different types which I didn't even know that and what I read online is that you're simply going
56:29
to cut off the ends now if you've done this before I'm sorry if I'm doing it
56:34
incorrectly but I know that they said to cut off the ends of the dragon fruit now you're just basically going to peel back
56:42
this skin of the dragon fruit and expose the fruit part so it kind of looks like
56:47
a kiwi but it's white what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut it just into thin
56:52
slices now for the second one I might just cut them up into into cubees so isn't this great this is great what I
56:59
love about freeze drying is I'm literally trying all different types of stuff and the reason you freeze dry
57:05
fruit is one for long-term storage depending on what type of packaging you're going to use you can store freeze
57:12
dried anything for a long period of time most websites say 25 years I don't know
57:19
of anybody that freeze dried something in 1999 as of this video and is eating it today so I don't really know how
57:25
accurate that 25 years is but we do know that there is packaging that you know the
57:31
military uses that has MREs and things that can store for a very long time in
57:37
fact people are still opening those types of things from the World War II and things like that good I'm actually
57:43
going to take a taste of this dragon fruit kind of a
57:48
kiwi a little bit of a crunch too that's delicious if you're interested in freeze drying or you're interested in any of
57:54
the equipment that I used in today's video so far you can check out Freez dryings supplies.com I've got it up here
58:00
in the video as well as in the video description now I'm an affiliate of them so you will be kicking back a little bit
58:06
back to me for this video that type of Kickback from F dryon supplies really will help me put out more more videos
58:12
and time into this channel so that I can expose you to more and more about freeze drying freeze drying entrepreneurship
58:18
and the whole industry as a whole I've got a lot of great content coming up so if you're interested go to free drying
58:24
supplies.com and you you'll check out all different types of supplies and accessories that you can do to improve
58:30
your freeze drying and freeze drying business so let's get back to the next couple fruits all right let's get started with the papaya now I've never
58:36
done this before so this is going to be my first time as well so you're going to see my my failures in here or my
58:41
successes but what I did see online is that you're going to basically peel the skin off of the papaya leaving and
58:47
exposing the fruit which should be kind of a pinkish color and then what we're going to do is we're going to cut it right in half and that will expose the
58:54
seeds inside here there's seeds papaya again this is my first time so I'm just going to kind of see how thick I'm doing
59:00
it and I'm going to go right along the edge of here and just keep
59:06
cutting the skin off of the papaya I don't know if any of you watch ASMR videos but this kind of stuff would give
59:14
me the tingles a little bit just seeing someone slice all of
59:19
this it's just kind of very soothing to to listen to and see
59:26
I know I'm G Going kind of slow but this is just kind of fun to see these slices all right so now we've got the skin all
59:32
off we're GNA toss this skin aside and we're going to do exactly what most fruit requires which we're going to cut
59:38
the ends off I'm going to cut right down the half this is what I watched and if you're wanting to rewatch this see how
59:45
there's seeds inside here this is pretty cool we're going to scoop out all these seeds Okay I'm going to be
59:53
careful not to scoop out too much of the fruit I'm sure there's some nutritional value in the seeds too so it wouldn't
1:00:00
hurt to um actually freeze dry maybe papaya seeds so I'm going to cut it into
1:00:07
these kind of slices here I'm going to try to get the same amount of length I'm
1:00:12
actually not really a cook but I'm amazed right now at the thickness and the accuracy that
1:00:20
I'm doing right now as you can see I'm I'm not I'm not really trying to be super specific here I'm just going to
1:00:26
cut them up into smaller pieces and we've got our thicker kind of longer pieces as well again if you're interested in freeze drying if you like
1:00:33
freeze drying as a business and you're interested in this Channel and following me more make sure you check out the next
1:00:38
couple videos after we get done with the kiwis and I'll show you the blueprint to freeze drying other types of fruits like
1:00:45
blueberries strawberries things like that and also there's a ton of other videos that you can find did you know
1:00:51
that there's over 50,000 tons of kiwis produced every year in the United States
1:00:57
that's a lot we also import them um in the United States from other countries but kiwis are great this is the last
1:01:04
fruit that we're going to do I just like cutting off the ends and then I also I kind of just carefully cut the outside
1:01:11
of the skin you don't have to do this you can use a spoon I'm going to cut
1:01:16
these in like kind of like thinner slices so we have kind of a full kiwi so
1:01:21
what we're going to do here instead is I'm going to cut it kind of at the top and now now we're going to scoop out the
1:01:29
Kiwi from the skin the problem with this though is I feel like you lose some of
1:01:35
the fruit in here see um so that that's just kind of the the pros and cons of
1:01:40
this plus it's super juicy see all the juice coming out of this anyway this is just not going to turn out good I don't
1:01:46
like this method too much hit that like button I'd really love the support that way I kind of gauge whether this is
1:01:52
something everyone is interested in if you've got a faster method of cutting kiwis I'd love to hear about it that's
1:01:59
what the comments in YouTube is all about is I read every single one of those I try to respond as quickly as I
1:02:05
can because I want to engage with all of you all of us are in this in freeze drying no matter where you're just
1:02:12
starting out experimenting with candy fruit ice cream other types of products
1:02:18
all of us are in this together and this is just the beginning of the freeze-dried business industry because
1:02:25
it used to be all pharmaceutical it all used to be for the big boys and companies now we can all make our own
1:02:32
living doing this and don't worry about saturation if you're watching this long into the kiwis this is my this is my my
1:02:39
two cents about everyone talking about all the market saturated and Candy everything like that well if you look up
1:02:45
the definition of saturation that means that you can basically no longer like
1:02:52
fill and there's no candy to be made ever again like no everyone's eaten or
1:02:57
eaten all all of the candy possible which isn't true there's so many different other avenues so don't worry
1:03:03
about that keep doing what you're doing and there is so much runway for a freeze
1:03:09
dry business coming up in the coming years and I'm proof of that I'm just I'm
1:03:15
still doing it after four years I've still got this channel it's all going to be dedic dedicated to highlighting
1:03:21
what's possible now we've got all the trays we're going to use this final tray stacker
1:03:27
lid snap it shut the freeze dryer settings for this fruit I'm going to do is the default settings for pretty much
1:03:34
all freeze dryer Brands which normally come at a default at 120 or
1:03:39
125° that's what I'm going to run these at but I'm going to make sure that the final dry is at least 6 to 8 hours long
1:03:46
you can do it as long as you want to but that's what I'm going to start these out at go to the next couple videos in the thumbnails coming up next and watch more
1:03:52
videos about freeze drying especially my blue print to freeze drying other types of fruits as well check that video out
1:03:59
and I'll see you [Music]
1:04:09
there a freeze dryer like the one next to me removes water activity and moisture from various different foods
1:04:15
I've got several different fruits and I'm going to show you what the net weight is after freeze drying let's get
1:04:20
[Music] started the fruits that we're going to do today to see gross versus net weight
1:04:27
is we're going to do pineapple we're going to do raspberries strawberries blueberries and apples all
1:04:35
right here are all the tools that I use to prepare fruit these have really helped me be more efficient in my
1:04:40
business and get these fruits prepared very quickly and easily now if you're
1:04:45
interested in purchasing any of these I've got links in the video description of this video that link directly to
1:04:51
Amazon they are affiliate links so I do get a small commission and for the very small amount that Amazon does give me in
1:04:57
commission I use it directly to buy different tools and things that I'm seeing that would be beneficial for all
1:05:03
of you to see me use for this freeze drying channel so I'd appreciate any type of purchases that go through those
1:05:08
links all right so what we've got here is I've got a knife sharpener this is an antique sharpener I don't think you're
1:05:14
going to find that on the Amazon links but I do have one that's more modern on there this is a uh egg slicer um that I
1:05:22
use for strawberries to slice into different pieces now this is an apple core so this goes directly into the core
1:05:29
which I'll show you of the pineapple and then after you get it CED you slice this down and it gets you really nice
1:05:35
bite-sized pieces with this piece uh I got a really great knife and then I've also got of course the roller Berry
1:05:42
which I did a video on and this pokes the skin of blueberry so that the moisture releases and you get a really
1:05:47
nice crispy blueberry um and it drops the blueberries with this little uh groove right here also I've got this
1:05:54
apple slicer now this is actually more of a potato slicer believe it or not for fries but I use it for apples and you
1:06:01
put it in here then you slide this lever and it creates all these different nice little small bite-size fry slices for
1:06:08
[Music] apples all right so let's get started with blueberries so what I've got is a
1:06:15
scale here that will measure the gross and net weight but I wanted to make sure I showed you what I'm kind of doing
1:06:21
within this video so for blueberries here that I've already washed what what I did is I I really looked for a Tray's
1:06:29
worth in the large freeze dryer worth of fruit and I made sure that I did a pound
1:06:34
of every type of fruit or more and so this is a carton of blueberries it's 6
1:06:41
oz gross starting out and I did three of those so what we're going to do is we're going to turn on the scale now I'm going
1:06:47
to use this bowl and then I'm going to tear it off so that it gets to zero and then we're going to pour the
1:06:54
blueberries into this bowl for the blueberries it's 1 lb and 3 oz so that's
1:07:00
what we'll start with with the blueberries now it's time to use the roller Berry and get the blueberries poked again I use a Harvest Right tray
1:07:08
and silicone mat to line these up and uh if you'd like to buy Harvest Right mats
1:07:14
you can obviously go to their website I've got a link in the description and just transfer the blueberries over to the freezer paper you want to have the
1:07:21
shiny side up and then we just keep doing the blueberries
1:07:26
[Music]
1:07:42
all right this is 18 oz of blueberries poked and all with the roller Berry I'm going to put this into the freezer so
1:07:47
we'll pre-freeze it and then we'll get into the freeze dryer and see what the net weight is of 18 oz of blueberries
1:07:54
all right the blue blueberries are done take a look at this this is what your freeze dry blueberry should look like
1:08:00
when you poke the skin it shouldn't look like this one this one wasn't poked as you can see it kind of exploded the rest
1:08:07
of them did not so this is a good solid batch of blueberries now if you recall what we did with the blueberries this
1:08:13
gross weight was about 18 Oz we did three packs of 6 oz of the blueberries
1:08:18
let's see how much the blueberries get for net weight
1:08:23
all right so let's take a look at the results after we put in 18 oz of blueberries starting out we got after
1:08:30
freeze drying 2.3 net ounz of freeze-dried
1:08:37
blueberries all right next up is raspberries this is another 6 oz Carton
1:08:42
and I've put three raspberries I've already washed all of these raspberries so we're going to transfer it to this
1:08:48
bowl let it zero out then let's put the raspberries on there all right so what we've got here for gross rate for the
1:08:54
raspberries just a little bit over a pound so we've got a pound and roughly
1:08:59
maybe 2 to 3 oz of raspberries so we'll put that onto the baking sheet and then
1:09:05
put it in the [Music] freezer all right so here's a pound of
1:09:12
raspberries we'll put this into the freezer let it pre-freeze and then we'll put it into the freeze dryer this is
1:09:17
what freeze-dried raspberries looks like becomes super crunchy I'll smash one of
1:09:22
these just super Airy it's very very tart but very delicious great for smoothies yogurts that's how I would
1:09:29
Market it and um just excellent excellent fruit to freeze dry we're going to put them into the
1:09:38
bowl and let's see what it came out to all right so how much did we get from 18
1:09:43
oz of raspberries 2.2 net ounces were produced from freeze drying raspberries
1:09:50
I do want to invite you to a couple of my other videos there's a lot of other videos on how to do different candies
1:09:55
for fruits and I even do ice cream so check that out and as always if you enjoy this video please hit the like
1:10:01
button but also subscribe to the channel so that you can be notified of future videos and join us in this F giant
1:10:07
Community thanks all right so let's get started
1:10:12
with strawberries now and what we're going to do is we're going to cut off the stems of the strawberries that are
1:10:17
already washed so that we can figure out the gross weight of that versus with the stems on
1:10:23
[Music]
1:10:38
all right now that the stems are off of the strawberries we're going to weigh the gross weight that way we know where we started I'm doing 2 lbs of
1:10:45
strawberries out of these cartons so there's one and then another one of these all right sweet so we're starting
1:10:50
off with 2 lbs of strawberries with the stems off which is awesome I'm going to go ahead and slide R these strawberries
1:10:56
and then we'll put it on the baking sheet and put it in the [Music]
1:11:08
freezer pounds of strawberries all the gross great so we're going to put this into the freezer and then we'll see what
1:11:15
the net weight comes out okay here we go with strawberries these are freeze-dried strawberries they should be very crispy
1:11:22
and Airy and look like this and just basically snap in half these are awesome
1:11:27
this probably my one of my
1:11:33
favorite okay so what do we get for the strawberries we got 3.4 net ounz from 2
1:11:39
lb of strawberries all sliced in
1:11:45
all all right so one of my favorite fruits that's freeze dry but I don't do it as much as I should is pineapple I've
1:11:53
got two Pineapple we cor it using this core and then we'll put all those slices
1:11:59
into a bowl and figure out the gross weight so let's do [Music]
1:12:07
that so now we're ready to core the
1:12:12
pineapple this is a really bright pineapple as you can tell by the
1:12:18
outside layer but that's okay I just wanted to get some pineapple for this
1:12:24
video to kind see how much we're going to get we're going to use now this
1:12:29
slicer and this goes all the way down and gets you into like the little bite-sized pieces two pineapples all
1:12:35
sliced and cord we've got 1 lb and almost 15 oz so we'll put this into the
1:12:43
freezer freeze-dried pineapple is super delicious man the flavor is just fantastic now sometimes you do need to
1:12:50
freeze dry this a little bit longer I've checked a lot of these and it should kind of sound like what you're hearing
1:12:56
it should sound like it's dry and just kind of crumbling up and breaking apart like this all right so what do we get
1:13:01
from Pineapple we got five net ounces from 2 lb of pineapple sliced and cord
1:13:10
awesome all right last fruit on our list for this video is going to be apples I've got some Gayla apples this is about
1:13:16
2 lb of apples there's only five of them now this is one of my favorite tools for
1:13:22
prepping fruit other than the roller Berry this is a fry slicer that I found off at Amazon this is fantastic you put
1:13:29
the Apple into this apple core and then you push this lever and it slices out
1:13:37
the Apple into these little pieces that look like fries
1:13:43
[Music]
1:13:55
all right so let's see how much this weighs as part of a gross once we've sliced them on all right so look what
1:14:01
we've got here we've got 1 lb and 12 oz gross weight for all these apple slices
1:14:07
so we'll put them onto the baking sheet and then we'll put them into the freezer and we'll see what happens after we
1:14:13
freeze dry all right freeze-dried apples are out they're just awesome they look very snacky that's why I like doing that
1:14:19
potato slicer big reveal how much did we get from five Gayla apples we got 4.3
1:14:25
net ounces of freeze dried Apple [Music]
1:14:31
fry hey I wanted to address a couple of questions that usually come up in my videos which is you know if you're
1:14:36
starting out doing a freeze dry business or you're currently doing one one of the things you're trying to evaluate is what
1:14:42
the price is going to be on your packages based on various sizes but also you know how much weight or how much
1:14:48
product do you put in there so to answer that question I really didn't make it too complicated on myself when I first
1:14:53
started out and even even to this day I went online I did some Google searches I went on to Etsy and I looked to see what
1:15:00
other freeze drying companies were pricing their products at and the net weight and what I found to be more
1:15:06
consistent online and from other freeze dry companies including large companies like the brands that you see at Target
1:15:12
and Trader Joe's freeze drying fruit generally about one net ounce of freeze-dried fruit is going to run about
1:15:19
$6 to7 I add probably $2 to $3 for m in
1:15:25
because I'm a local small business it's a little bit more premium I'm not mass-- producing it I'm more pricing it as a
1:15:31
local premium freeze-dried fruit product so that's what I would suggest you doing is kind of looking at about an ounce of
1:15:39
product and then marking it up to probably about $9 to $10 per ounce you
1:15:45
need to evaluate you know how much labor you're putting into prepping all that fruit as you saw earlier in this video
1:15:51
it did take a lot of time to prep and slice and do different types of fruits maybe raspberries was one of those that
1:15:57
didn't take that much time but you really do need to take into account the time and labor that you're putting into
1:16:03
that and also you're not adding any preservatives or sugars like some of the other companies might be doing so to
1:16:08
recap the answer is those larger companies that are mass-- producing freeze-dried fruit they are pricing
1:16:15
about one net ounce of fruit for about 6 to7 so for the smaller business
1:16:21
freeze-dried companies I would recommend pricing that up about $2 to $3 more dollar I'm still selling all the fruit
1:16:26
that I put out there to my customers and in retail stores it still seems to be demanding that type of price hey that
1:16:33
was awesome figuring out the gross and net weight of all these different fruits I think this is really helpful just for
1:16:38
you to evaluate and figure out what you can forecast for all the different Cycles based on how many pounds you need
1:16:44
to buy at the store and then how many you're going to actually get out of freeze drying in that cycle because it's
1:16:50
all about just knowing how quickly you can get stuff freeze dry but also how much bags you can get so that you can
1:16:55
get out there and sell so I hope this video was helpful make sure you subscribe to this Channel and join us in the freeze drying Community thanks again
1:17:02
for watching and do something great for your community for freeze drying as a business see you
1:17:10
[Music]

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