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!
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!!
Aside from my terrible timing and these finishing at 3am, super pleased with how the freeze dried mushrooms came out. woohoo🥳 pic.twitter.com/iRLvTcI3Ab
— Buck Hills Farm (@buck_hills_farm) February 4, 2024
