There is nothing quite like delicious, fresh fruit on a hot summer day. Picture this: you are at the beach, the sun is beating down on you, but the bowl of watermelon in your lap is refreshing and it is keeping you hydrated, life is good. Does it get better than that? Actually, it might …
There is in fact a down-side to purchasing fresh fruit – the short shelf life. Oftentimes we see our money go down the drain alongside the moldy fruit we just bought a couple of days ago.
However, with the process of freeze-drying, your fruit can now have a shelf life of 25 years! The low-maintenance that freeze-dried fruit requires is perfect for a road-trip, camping, or simply for everyday use.
Welcome to this week’s segment on What Can Be Freeze-Dried? Fruit Edition!
So, then, what fruit can even be freeze-dried? For the most part, every fruit can be freeze-dried. Strawberries, cherries, grapes, apples, bananas, watermelon you can freeze-dry it all! Doesn’t that sound too good to be true? Well, you can always trust us here at that sweet lyfe and we can confirm that IT IS TRUE!
The Most Popular Freeze-Dried Fruits Are:
- Freeze-dried strawberries
- Freeze-dried mangos
- Freeze-dried raspberries
- Freeze-dried apples
- Freeze-dried blueberries
- Freeze-dried bananas
Our personal favourite is dried-strawberries! YUM!
There aren’t any specific fruits that cannot be freeze-dried. It is just a matter of which fruits take longer to freeze-dry and which fruits you need more time to prepare before freeze-drying them. Grapes, for example, have a thick outer layer, and so it will take a lot longer to freeze-dry a grape than to freeze-dry let’s say a banana slice. And as for cherries, there is an additional preparation phase to the freeze-drying process because you have to remove the pit of the cherry beforehand.
If there are a few tips that we can give you, before you put your fruit in your freeze-drying machine, they are to:
- Cut the fruit into small chunks for better results.
- Cut through fruit such as grapes and blueberries because they have a thick outer layer that can make it difficult to remove the moisture during the freeze-drying process.
Picture this: you are making last-minute plans for a road-trip with your friends, you are rushing to pack everything you can think of, you enter your kitchen and you need to bring snacks since you are camping outside for a few days, but then you remember the freeze-dried bags of fruit you have in your pantry, so you snatch those up, toss them into your bag – because they are easy to store – and you run out of the door to go pick up your friends.
And the trip went perfectly.
**Have a very Merry Christmas**