Will the price of Freeze Driers go down? (USA question)
When Microwaves first came out they were huge but with a tiny cooking area and they were not affordable, and were mostly in business kitchens and a few restaurants. I would love a freeze dryer but the cheapest I have seen is $1600 and they only have 4 small trays.
Probably not. They aren't mass produced to the same extent because while there is a market for them, that market isn't even close to as large as the microwave market.
Also, I highly recommend Technology Connections' video on freeze dryers, as it highlights why it's not as useful as they may seem - They have their uses, but freeze drying is not the ultimate food preservation method.
The video goes in depth into how freeze drying works (and doesn't), and I recommend watching the entire thing and evaluate whether you actually need one.
Watch this episode. It will cure most people of wanting a freeze dryer. The only thing I would get one for is if I did a lot of backpacking or expected the zombie apocalypse after I had 5 years to freeze dry enough shit to trade for concubines.
Yeah, I was going to say “nice try posting here, Alex”
freeze drying is not the ultimate food preservation method.
Ultimate? No. But it's part of a suite of food preservation tools. Without watching the video--YouTube is doing that annoying thing where it requires sign-in--I can say that you need to be able to use multiple food preservation techniques. You should learn to do canning as well, and you really need an effective vacuum sealer (that can use heavy-duty mylar, versus specialty plastic bags) in order to effectively preserve freeze dried foods, and those mylar packages need to also be sealed in containers away from pests that might chew through the bags.
Freezing food, by itself, is only useful as long as you have electricity. If you're entirely off-grid, and have over-capacity solar system, that might be good enough, if you have a LOT of freezer space. The least expensive freezers I can find are around $25 ft3; costs decrease slightly when you're talking about large walk-in freezers, but that requires a building that can accept a walk-in installation, and $25,000 for a 1000ft3 freezer is more than most people can afford.
Drying foods in general is decent, and high sugar content--fruits in particular--can lasts decades if they're vacuum packed with oxygen absorbers. Even though dried foods will have some moisture content, the sugars act as a preservative and prevent the growth of bacteria. (Sugar curing meat is definite a real thing, much like salt curing; more on this in a sec.)
Canning is good for some things, but certain things can not be safely canned, and canning is slooooooooooow. It also requires a botttle/ring/seal for each and every thing that you can; seals are not reusable.
Dry goods don't need to be freeze-dried; you can vacuum seal most of them with oxygen absorbers and desiccants, and be fine. Things like flour can mostly be put in large buckets with gamma seal lids and be okay for years at a time. White rice stores wonderfully for the long term, as do dried beans. (However!, dried beans must be soaked prior to cooking, the soaking water discarded prior to cooking, and can not safely be eaten raw. Cooked canned beans are a better choice for anything other than very long term storage.) Brown rice has a high fat content relative to white rice, and has a bad tendency to spoil, as do nuts of all varieties; I haven't tried vacuum sealing them with oxygen absorbers and desiccants to see if that preserves them for longer than a few years.
Meats can be preserved by curing. This is, however, a very exacting process, and it not recommended unless you know what you're doing. It requires a temperature and moisture controlled container and a few weeks of time, and fucking it up means that you kill yourself with bacterial contamination.
Freeze drying works for complete meals where you can't freeze things, and you want food that's going to be ready-to-go, either rehydrated or dry. Yes, you can eat freeze dried things without reconstituting them, although it's not terribly pleasant in some/many cases. If you, for instance, made a stock-pot full of red beans and rice, freeze drying would be the ideal way of preserving it and making it shelf-stable.
Freeze dryers are much less useful day-to-day so the market is much smaller which won't really drive much of a scaling up of production like happened for microwaves I imagine
Its probably more affordable to just buy prepackaged foods than to spend the money and considerable time and effort on a freeze dryer.
Check out Technology Connection's in depth video on the subject: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Namf-Ddo_Xo
Consumer goods become cheaper through innovation and economies of scale. Freeze drying is a mature technology with limited appeal.
No. For every one freeze dryer that is sold 1000 microwaves are sold. The consumer demand simply isn’t there outside of niche communities like survivalists
Freeze driers? No no no.....you want REAL dryers! It's winter time, maaaan! Don't you want your clothes coming out fluffy, and warm??? You ever put on a pair of snug warm underwear immediately out of the dryer? It hugs your buttcrack and makes it feel like christmas for your balls!
Stay warm!
“Ever try doing laundry before you run out of clean underwear?”- your mom, maybe.
“I suppose I should be glad you’re doing laundry at all.”- also possibly your mom.
I always wondered if freeze drying my clothes would be better in any way.
Also, for a period of my life, I used to put clean underwear in the freezer. That way, if the morning shower didn't wake me up, getting dressed certainly would. 1/10 would recommend.
Dehydrators work reasonably well for many similar uses and are pretty cheap
And freeze dried food is so expensive as well :/ cries in absolutely loving freeze dried fruits over regular ones
You could DIY by freezing your food and then putting it in a vacuum chamber that can handle a lot of moisture. There’s a very detailed video about the second part and if I’m not mistaken you’d only need to freeze the stuff before hand to get freeze dried.
A quick web search shows that you can freeze dry at home without a dedicated machine. A bunch of sites say you can do it in a regular fridge's freezer.