While we were at Costco buying groceries and Reese’s peanut butter cups, I decided some freeze-dried grapes would be nice, so I picked up two three-pound containers:
As with every other fruit I’ve chosen to freeze-dry, preparation continues to be the most time consuming aspect since I had to slice every grape in half as per Harvest Right’s instructions:
What I didn’t do was to flip every grape so that the skin side is down. According to Harvest Right, you need to properly expose the insides of food so that the moisture will escape. But, from what I can tell, that didn’t seem to be my problem. Anyway, I went with it and didn’t think much of it after that.
The unit decided the grapes were done after about 29 hours, but I was immediately skeptical because grapes have a lot of water in them and because other fruits needed at least that long; the pineapple, for instance, needed 49 hours.
I opened the door anyway and tasted a few. Sadly, they were still chewy, but then I remembered that grapes also have a lot of sugar content, so I figured they just needed a bit more back. Back in the freeze dryer for more drying time. After several more hours… still not done. Eventually, I decided to let the unit run overnight. After nearly 54.5 hours–most of it drying time–I decided I was done:
I removed the grapes and tasted one, and although I was hopeful, a few more taste tests and it was obvious the grapes weren’t properly freeze-dried:
I began to wonder if I was doing something wrong (a definite possibility) but I was having a difficult time finding anyone else saying that their freeze-dried grapes were still “chewy,” until I eventually ran across this video where it seems this guy had the same problem:
According to his experiment, a lack of blanching is my problem. Truth be told, I would’ve never assumed that I needed to blanch grapes in order for them to freeze-dry. In fact, a few other videos I’d watched about freeze-drying grapes never mentioned a word about blanching, and it appears that their grapes turned out dry (and not chewy) like I’d expected. Perhaps I got defective grapes? Yup, that’s the problem. 🙂
I ended up bagging the grapes for use in our morning fruit smoothies:
After freeze-drying, I ended up with 1 pound, 4.6 ounces. Maybe I should’ve let the unit run even longer, but I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere, and considering that I spend roughly $3.31 per 24 hours to run the machine, I was at about $7.51 in energy costs just to end up with chewy grapes. Another lesson learned, I guess.
But my troubles weren’t over. Trying to get the grapes unstuck from the trays was a real nightmare. At first, I flung pieces of grapes all over the kitchen trying to free their grip from the trays, but I eventually figured out a system that worked It was still a lot of unexpected effort, not to mention the mess left on the trays:
For now, I’m going to say that attempting to freeze-dry grapes was a giant failure. I honestly never expected to have a problem with freeze-drying any fruit or vegetable, and I don’t see me blanching grapes just to freeze-dry them either.
Leave a Reply