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What is freeze-drying?

Many Be More superfoods are made with the freeze-drying method. What does it mean?

Freeze-dried food offers many advantages: looking fresh, tasting fresh, staying fresh, and weighing less than fresh foods. Another advantage is that they add variety to your meals while being quick and easy to prepare. Freeze-dried foods enable the meals you create to taste much like those you create using fresh foods.

The freeze-drying process

Freeze-drying removes moisture from raw, frozen product through a vacuum system. The frozen raw product is cut down to the desired piece size and spread evenly onto trays that are stacked and stored in freezers. The sized product freezes at an even colder temperature, reaching an optimal state at which the original shape of the product can be retained.

The trays are then loaded into a refrigerated freeze-drying chamber that seals tightly shut. The chamber’s vacuum system removes ice from the product and converts it directly to a vapor without moving through the liquid state. Since the water is removed from the product in a frozen state, cell structure remains intact and finished product bears a close resemblance to its fresh counterpart, thus retaining its piece identity.

Advantages of freeze-drying

Whole food nutrition and freshness

Because they are minimally processed, freeze-dried foods can be clean ingredients, free from synthetic, artificial, and highly processed materials. Freeze-drying retains nutritional value better than other drying methods. The process also preserves the actual color and shape of the original raw material, so we are actually getting real fruits and vegetables in our diets. The intense flavor and aroma of freeze-dried ingredients also closely resembles the profile of the raw material.

Low storage weight

Freeze-dried foods have approximately 98 percent of their water removed, resulting in foods that typically weigh 75 to 90 percent less than the original food. The freeze-drying process results in foods that are exceptionally light. This makes the food easy to package, transport, and store. For this reason, freeze-dried foods are excellent for your camping and backpacking trips.

Freeze-dried ingredients can be cut or ground into many different sizes and shapes – everything from whole fruits and vegetables down to fine powders.

Prolonged shelf life

The shelf life of any dried food directly links to the moisture content in it. Removing water through the freeze-drying process removes the potential for bacterial growth. Moisture content varies from product to product, but an average for freeze-dried products is around 3% moisture. The actual length of shelf life for any freeze-dried superfood depends on the packaging, storage temperature and superfood itself.

Other methods

Canning

Very poor nutrition left (40%). The taste changes because of cooking beforehand.

Freezing

When vegetables are in season, buy them fresh and ripe. Out of season, frozen vegetables will give you a high concentration of nutrients. Simply put the food in a container and put it in the freezer. The taste changes because of water in the food (ice crystals).

Dehydrating

It can lose up to 50% of the original nutrients. Look and taste different from the fresh product.

 

Written by nutritionist Riin Reimer

 

References:

https://www.beprepared.com/blog/84/the-advantages-of-freeze-dried-foods/

https://www.vandrunenfarms.com/blog/advantages-freeze-drying/

https://www.greenhouseemporium.com/blogs/greenhouse-gardening/is-freeze-drying-the-best-food-preservation-method

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