Freeze-Dried Spinach

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted about my freeze-drying adventures, but I haven’t been totally lazy with it since I’ve freeze-dried:

• More apples. I used an apple corer which made prep time significantly faster. I think a big part of this is figuring out how to make preparation faster and easier.
• More eggs. I didn’t scramble the eggs this time and they still freeze-dried properly, even the yolks. Tasted fine, too.
• Candy. I did more Skittles, but nothing new to report there.

Today I do have something new: freeze-dried spinach. We like to put spinach in our smoothies sometimes and, although we often freeze the spinach to keep it from going bad before we can use it all, my wife suggested I try to freeze-dry some. So, while I was at Walmart, I picked up three containers of organic spinach (one pound each):

Turns out that I only needed two containers, and that’s with me piling the spinach on the trays more than I’d preferred:

The Harvest Right only needed a total of 16 hours to finish, but my guess is that it finished significantly sooner (sometime in the middle of the night) because it wasn’t running the usual two hour countdown timer like it does when it finishes, so I really don’t know how long it needed.

In any case, the spinach came out looking like it wasn’t done in some spots, at least the dark parts looked like they were wilted:

As always, I like to grab some of the food and test whether it’s dried out enough, and it was. It sort of sounded like I was grabbing a bunch of dried out leaves that had fallen from a tree as I was packing them into the Mylar bags.

Although I didn’t expect it, I’d made more of a mess than I intended, including losing a few dozen spinach leaves in the process, either from losing them over the sides, on the floor, or just not bothering to grab every last piece that I’d crunched up while packaging. I should’ve done better:

I ended up with needing three Mylar bags in total–I was dead set on not using more–for a total of 2.5 ounces of freeze-dried spinach after starting with a total of roughly two pounds (or 32 ounces):

As always, I like to check on Amazon to find out how I’d done, and as it turns out, this wasn’t worth it at all! Seems I can get 8 ounces of freeze-dried spinach flakes for just under $14. I spent $9.98 on the two pounds from Walmart, another $2.20 on electricity, and about $3 on the Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers for a total of roughly $15. Now, I know my math isn’t always the best, but I think I just screwed myself, lol. Lesson learned: check online for pricing first!

You might also be interested in my ongoing saga with the impulse sealer. About a month ago, a reader mentioned that maybe I have a defective unit, which got me to thinking: maybe it’s just the sealing strip that’s bad? It’s a simple enough part to replace. Here’s the old one along with the old Teflon tape:

I replaced the strip (Harvest Right included a replacement with my original purchase) and things are generally doing better:

The seals aren’t always great, but I think that’s still more of a problem with me, for example, trying to shove too much food in a bag such that the sides don’t lay flat. Anyway, fingers crossed this was the bigger problem!