Freeze-Dried Lunchbox Peppers

I know I haven’t posted in quite a while about my freeze-drying adventures. It’s not that I haven’t been freeze-drying food, but that I haven’t found anything new or interesting to share … until today. At least, my wife suggested I freeze-dry some of our lunchbox peppers we’ve been growing in the garden:

Now, I couldn’t say how many we have (I didn’t weigh them or count) but there were easily many dozens. In fact, we went out and grabbed some more because there weren’t enough to fill the trays initially.

Although I begged to differ, my wife (who chose to help this time for the first time and probably the last time ever) insisted we wash the outsides, remove the seeds, and then wash them again. We ended up with 4.5 trays like this:

Here’s a close look:

For those of you who enjoy peppers, these don’t have much bite; even my wife enjoyed them, and she despises spiciness. I’d imagine even the word “spicy” wrangles her to her core. 😉

After about twenty hours only, the peppers were done being freeze-dried. I should mention that this might also be the first time when I hadn’t paid much attention to the process, assuming the freeze-drying process would take longer than it did. It was so much longer that I left it all until the next morning, probably wasting a good twelve hours of freeze-dryer runtime.

Additionally, I forgot to allow the unit to warm the trays before I grabbed them from the unit. Since it cools the chamber to about -42 degrees Fahrenheit, I needed mittens to grab them!

Anyway, here’s what they looked like when finished:

As I expected, the peppers were crisp and light. They even tasted good freeze-dried, which I didn’t expect.

I ended up with 3 bags and about 3.9 net ounces of peppers total:

As usual, I like to search online for a comparison, but I couldn’t find anything comparable this time. That’s not entirely unexpected, I mean, who wants to buy freeze-dried lunchbox peppers for long-term storage? For what it’s worth, I did find a #10 can (6.3 oz) freeze-dried green bell peppers for $52.

I should also mention that it’s more difficult to come up with an exact cost these days because our electric company forced us onto an “energy savings plan” that changes our rate during the weekdays. Thus, I’m not going to try and calculate an exact figure. But I know that each Mylar bag and oxygen absorber cost me roughly $1 each. Add in a few dollars for electricity, and I’d say this cost me roughly $6 or $7 besides my time.

Most importantly, now we have three bags of yummy lunchbox peppers for the apocalypse. 🙂