As much as I want to freeze-dry new foods and see what my Harvest Right can do, I have to remember that its purpose is to put nutritious food away for my family should hard times finally strike.
With that in mind, my wife reminded me that I would rather hell freeze over than go without bananas during the apocalypse–yes, I love bananas that much–so I decided to run another batch while they’re still inexpensive. I’ll spare you most of the details as you can read my first post on freeze-drying bananas, but I figured you might be interested to know of a few changes.
First, I wanted to learn how to slice the bananas faster. Last time, I think it took me about an hour until I was finished. I thought about using a Mandoline slicer, but then I found this video on using a pizza slicer, which certainly made the process faster. I only needed about a half-hour total this time:
Perhaps the only problem with using the pizza slicer is that I had even less uniform slices than the first time:
Since bananas were one of the first items I’d ever freeze-dried, I’d assumed that getting them uniform was crucial, sort of like it is when dehydrating, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
As before, I ended up with five relatively full trays, but I think they’re a bit more full this as as I started with eighteen pounds of bananas as opposed to eleven pounds:
Total runtime was 31 hours this time as opposed to 25 hours the first time. As usual, I tested a few, especially the thicker slices, to ensure they were fully dried out. They were dried as expected:
Ultimately, I ended up with just shy of three pounds of freeze-dried bananas (as compare to just over two pounds last time).
After spending $11.94 on the bananas, needing six Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers, which cost me about $1 for each pair, and considering that I used roughly $3.45 in electricity (assumes $3.31 per 24 hours), I spent $21.39 (excluding sales tax and my time).
About the closest option I could find on Amazon was this #10 can of freeze-dried bananas, which holds just over one pound of bananas) for $36.99. It would’ve cost me over $100 to purchase the same amount of freeze-dried bananas online as what I was able to put back on my own. That’s a savings of about $80. Looks like my Harvest Right will pay for itself in no time. 🙂
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