What is your favourite candy? It’s a difficult question to answer – isn’t it, there’s so many to choose from. You have your chewy taffy, decadent chocolates, gooey caramels, and much, much more! Wow, our mouths are watering just thinking of all the heavenly goodness! Here at that sweet lyfe we love a wide variety of candy! And, if you don’t like candy, the road ends here, I don’t think we can be friends … just kidding, as long as you can appreciate a well-cooked meal, then we’re all good! Speaking of a well-cooked meal, have you heard of the process of freeze drying? Freeze-drying is a dehydration method that removes the moisture from food to make it last longer while maintaining the flavour!
As a freeze-dried candy business in Canada, we get a lot of questions from people regarding the benefits of freeze-drying (for more information on the benefits, hold tight for our What Are the Advantages of Freeze-Drying blog post coming soon), but another question that we consistently get asked is: How long does it take to freeze-dry candy? Or how long does it take to freeze-dry in general?
The rule of thumb for freeze-drying is that the process typically takes about 24 hours. It is a long process, but the results are well worth it!
So, how long does it take to freeze-dry candy? There are different approaches that you can take here. You can freeze-dry candy without a freeze-dryer machine, or you can freeze-dry candy with a freeze-dryer machine. The latter will save you a lot of time. So, the time it takes does depend on the machine that you have. Freeze-drying candy without a machine and using a regular freezer instead can take multiple weeks for the process to reach a completion. Whereas using a freeze-drying machine such as the Harvest Right Freeze-Dryer can speed up the process to about 2-5 hours with the new Candy Mode.
Interestingly enough, some products have a faster freeze-drying process than others. Freeze-drying is all about removing the moisture from the product, so as you can assume the more moist it is, such as a pudding or ice cream, the longer it will take to freeze-dry.
Although, you can pretty much freeze-dry anything – there is a limited number of products that cannot be freeze-dried. Pure chocolate is one of them. This is because oily products don't freeze-dry well.
We urge you to pick up your favourite candy and try out the freeze-drying process for yourself, you won’t regret it!