I decided to freeze-dry some leftovers again this week, specifically leftover vegetable soup and what I thought was, at a glance, also leftover ham and bean soup, but which turned out to be chicken chili, and our dinner that night. Oops.
Although I didn’t weigh either, I’d say each soup started off at a few pounds:
I know they don’t look very appetizing, but they tasted good. (FYI, there was more chicken chili in a smaller container that I missed, so we did end up eating it for dinner.) I’d decided that I should try to extract as much liquid as I could, so I strained the vegetable soup before scooping it onto two trays:
I wanted to do the same thing with the chicken chili but it was thick enough already, so I just dumped it as is on two trays:
After about 35 hours, the machine said my soups were done, and after a bit of testing with a fork, I concurred. I was concerned, however, that with such disparate foods being freeze-dried at the same time something wouldn’t fully dry out, but I was pleasantly surprised. More specifically, it’s not just the fact that I’m trying to freeze-dry vegetable soup and chicken chili at the same time, but that all of the vegetables themselves may not properly dry out.
[Note: I should mention that the Harvest Right manual states you should avoid freeze-drying different types of food for fear of something not fully drying out, but thus far I haven’t noticed a problem. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.]
Here’s what they looked like when finished:
That looks even more appetizing than when I started! For some reason, I’m bound and determined to use as few Mylar bags as possible. Ultimately, I needed two bags each:
I ended up with roughly 17 ounces of chicken chili, and about 9 ounces of vegetable soup. I haven’t tried them yet as I just finished last night, but I did keep some out for a future taste test.
As a comparison, I wasn’t able to find a direct option on Amazon for my chicken chili, but I did find this Augason Farms Southwest Chili #10 can for a mere $24.54. Apparently, it’s nearly half off right now. The bad part is that it’s a full 3 lbs, 10 oz, more than triple the chicken chili that I was able to freeze-dry on my own. I was also able to find an Augason Farms Vegetable Stew #10 can, which looks similar to what I’d freeze-dried. It was a full 2 lbs for $16.17, nearly four times the amount I freeze-dried. Yikes!
If I do the math for electricity usage (35 hours * $0.1375 cost to run per hour = $4.81 total electricity) and add roughly one dollar for each Mylar bag and oxygen absorber used, I spent a total of $8.81. Of course, this excludes wear and tear on the machine as well as my time. As a rough comparison, if I were able to purchase an equivalent amount of Augason Farms food as noted above, I would’ve spent about $12. Thus, I saved roughly $3.19 doing this myself.
Take that Augason Farms!
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