Let’s make freeze dried candy!

I’m going to be honest here, it did not all work properly, lol

I used the Ice Queen freeze dryer (which you know is really the Harvest Right Home Pro Medium one) to make several different types of freeze dried candy.

• First, I freeze dried Werther’s Original Caramels – the kind with a sort of creamy stuff in the middle – these poofed up big and worked great!
• Second, I did Skittles and Starburst – Skittles are surprisingly awesome (folks who sell them say they’re a best seller) – the Starburst… more like StarBUST, lol.
• Third, I did hard candies – the Jolly Rancher brand worked fine, poofed up, tasted good – the generic brand did pretty much nothing.
• And finally, I did some gummy bears, which turned out good, and tried to re-do some of the generic hard candies just to see if I could get them to do what the Jolly Ranchers did – hard no on that one, total failure still.

Freeze dried candies don’t take very long, usually only 2 to 3 hours. When you first start a batch in Candy Mode, it warms the trays. Some people skip this step, I did not. Though it didn’t seem to matter… some candies worked and some just didn’t.

So let’s get into it all!

First up, Werther’s Original salted caramels

For the caramels, I cut them into fourths prior to freeze drying. I know this sounds crazy, as that’s really small, but it’s not. The caramels got big in the Ice Queen! I probably cold have cut them into eighths and they would have been just fine too, lol.

I also kept them pretty spaced out on the trays when I laid them out. This is because some folks had already told me they were going to get huge, so I tried to plan accordingly:)

So how long did it take to freeze dry salted caramels?

I let the freeze dryer do the entire tray warming thing it does, then it went into the drying phase. All said and done, these took 3 hours and 15 minutes.

There was no need to defrost after this batch of candy. Candy already has very little water in it, so when freeze drying it, not much ice collects around the edges of the machine. From what I’ve read, you can usually get away with doing 3 to 5 batches of candy without defrosting between.

Next, we freeze dried Skittles and Starburst

I didn’t do anything to either type of candy before freeze drying. Not sure if cutting the Starburst would have helped make them work or not, but they totally did nothing.

The Skittles turned out awesome though! They bust apart and become a crunchy deliciousness:)

And.. how long??

The freeze dried Skittles and no change Starburst (lol) took 3 hours. Like I already mentioned, the Skittles turned out great, the Starburst didn’t work right. So that was kind of a bummer, but you learn as you go!

Again, no defrost needed:)

Next we’ve got hard candy

So I did hard candy disks. Some were Jolly Rangers, which came out great, and some were generic.. nothing happened with those. I completely forgot to take photos of these, so that’s a bummer. But if you’re going to do hard candy, buy Jolly Rangers, lol!

Timeframe on the hard candies…

This batch took 3 hours and 10 minutes to finish. The Jolly ranchers got big and round (kind of like the caramels) and the generic candies didn’t do anything.

No defrost necessary, yet again, which is super nice! This allowed me to get one more batch in before calling it quits on freeze dried candy for the day.

And finally, gummy bears and another failed generic hard candy attempt

I spaced the gummy bears out, which is good because they definitely expanded! They got large and crispy, which is super neat!

Again with the generic hard candies.. lots of nothing. Waste of my time and space in the Ice Queen, hahaha! But, now I know. I just won’t bother again:)

And the final candy timeframe?

These took quite a bit longer, which surprised me. The entire process ran 4 hours and 25 minutes!

After this fourth batch, the Ice Queen did need to defrost. But since I was finished using her for the day, I just opened the door and let her defrost that way. Figured there was no point in wasting electricity when I wasn’t going to start another batch until the next morning.

This model is a bit higher in the front than in the back (oftentimes people prop up the front of older models if they’re flat), so the water will not drain out the door. Instead, it drains to the back and out the drain line as intended.

Candy is much quicker than batches of other things and the ones that work are fantastic!!

Happy freeze drying!!