We have been experimenting with all sorts of snacks, candies, and food in the freeze dryer as people have been giving us suggestions. We are open to more suggestions and trying all the things! Please comment on here if there's anything you'd like to see in our shop or something you'd like for us to try!
We got our very first freeze drying orders over the last week or so, and We got our very first order from our shop this Saturday! Super excited to be sharing healthier snacks with people!
Alysha's dad, Adrian, has been peddling our wares with all the people he interacts with at work. We are extremely blessed that he has been sharing our products and selling our products!
Our little girls absolutely love the freeze dried bananas, rasberries, strawberries, apples with cinnamon, pears with cinnamon, and yogurt dots. We have not found a good enough proccess or method to get the yogurt dots to stay together well enough to be comfortable trying to sell them, but we are still working on it.
If anyone orders from us, all we ask is that your be a little bit patient. We are still figuring out best practices and processes. Some of the stuff is not sitting on shelves so we are doing freeze dryer runs just to fill orders as we get them.
It tooks us five or six tries, but we did finally figure out how to get red hots to work! We started with hot tamales... hot tamales do not work. We switched to red hots and got them to work about 10-15% of the time.... tried a few things we found online, but just couldn't get anything to work consistently... Sooo.. we found that warming them at 180 for 35 mins on a baking sheet then 205 for 4 mins then immediately into the freeze dryer and turning the vacuum pump on works consistently. It is a lot of work, but it is the only process we have found to consistently work for cinnamon candies.
We are currently washing all of the fruit in an alkaline solution and rinsing them before putting them in the freeze dryer. We are hoping to find some local organic sources this spring once farmer's markets open up again.
The long term plan is to grow our own fruits and veggies, but planting an orchard and waiting for it produce take some time. It is our plan! We are going to plant fruit trees this spring.
Thank you for all the encouragement and support! Please comment with any suggestions, encouragements, or complaints!
~ The Spaulding Family
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