I was told freeze dried mushrooms are awesome…
… we shall see!!
People have said freeze dried mushrooms are great, so I’m giving it a shot! When it comes to mushrooms, I’m the only one in the house who likes them, so I don’t get to use them often. But having some in jars that are freeze dried will change that… I’ll be able to cook a meal without them that the boys like and then just add mushrooms to mine if I want to – how super fantastic!
This batch also included some sweet onion, which I have done before. You can check out the first batch of sweet onion I did here. For the mushrooms in this batch, I removed all the stems and sliced the tops as evenly as I could. then I laid the tops out on the trays in a single layer. I then chopped up the stems pretty small and put those on a tray in a thin layer. I don’t want to waste anything at all if I can avoid it!
The mushrooms and onions were pre-frozen. After my last batch not pre-freezing, and seeing how many extra hours it added, I will always pre-freeze from here on out! After the Ice Queen was ready to roll, I put the trays in and started the batch! I love my Ice Queen freeze dryer, which is a Harvest Right Home Pro Medium.
Can’t wait to see how these turn out! It’s just going to be so dang convenient to have them around without worrying they’ll go bad!
![mushrooms-and-sweet-onions mushrooms and sweet onions on trays to go into freeze dryer](https://buckhillsfarm.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/mushrooms-and-sweet-onions.jpg)
And, everyone was right – these rock!
The freeze dried mushrooms are so good! I ate a few right out of the freeze dryer and definitely dig them. I will be doing more in the future for sure! They have kind of a foam-like texture, which is interesting. But the flavors seem to be magnified when just eating them plain, which is rad!
As usual, I put everything into jars with oxygen absorbers and then vacuum sealed them I get my oxygen absorbers on Amazon from Wallaby, I just really like the way they’re packaged and I’ve never had a problem with them! And this is the Electric Mason Jar Vacuum Sealer I have. I think it’s great, and it’s small, which is good for me. I let each jar go for about a minute or so to ensure a good seal.
How long did the freeze dried mushrooms take?
The mushrooms along with the sweet onion took a total of 16 hours and 15 minutes. It actually finished the first time at 13 hours and 15 minutes, but the sweet onion wasn’t finished yet, so I added another 3 hours dry time, which ended up being perfect. Next time I do mushrooms, I will do only mushrooms, nothing else – which should cut down on the total time:)
Did the two hour defrost after this batch, it needed it.
Happy freeze drying!!
![freeze-dried-mushrooms freeze dried mushrooms](https://buckhillsfarm.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/freeze-dried-mushrooms.jpg)
Aside from my terrible timing and these finishing at 3am, super pleased with how the freeze dried mushrooms came out. woohoo
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— Buck Hills Farm (@buck_hills_farm) February 4, 2024