Freeze Dry – How I Can Do That

Baking Blues

In case anyone ever wants to know, the time I can get my cooking on and experiment is when the rest of the family is in bed asleep. The down side is that baking usually wakes my husband up and he has instant munchies. Did I mention that it doesn’t matter how much noise I make, what wakes him up is the aroma of fresh baked goods?

The funny part is that while I was editing photos (while the last batched finished baking) he comes in and asks me which one is the best one!

It’s moments like this where I color coded my muffins. Originally I did it, to make it easier to differentiate between the different blueberries. But it made it easier to give a midnight “unbiased” taste tester say which one he preferred. He chose the yellow muffins, for the record, and we’ll get to the muffins in just a moment.

Difference Between Preserved Berries

Last week I gave the run down on how the different preparations of the berries turned out in their preserved state. Above is a picture that I didn’t use last week, because I reconstituted the berries for making the muffins. From left to right, you’re looking at fresh blueberries, freeze dried, and dehydrated.

I really can’t tell you how much I’ve been enjoying the berries we picked. There is such a difference in quality of flavor. So if you haven’t picked blueberries for yourself, please do this for you. I know you will not look at store berries the same!

The freeze dried blue berries (before reconstituting) were a trip. They had a near fresh blueberry flavor and they were like a powder bomb in your mouth when you bite into them. There was a moment where I had to remind myself what it was that I just bit, because it confuses the brain when you’re not use to this texture. BUT… when you reconstitute them, let me tell you. The closest I can describe them is that they taste just like the store berries. They’re not as good as the fresh berries I picked, but that could have been because they are different breeds of blueberries. That’s enough to give a little flavor difference. I did drink the juice in the bottom of the bowl and that DID taste just like the blueberry juice that I made in this next section. That closeness alone is what makes me sold on freeze dried blueberries. (Aside from the obvious that they are shelf stable and last a lot longer than fresh berries.)

I reconstituted the dehydrated berries for the same length of time as the freeze dried. If you remember from last week, I described the dehydrated berries as having a bite to them. I’m personally not a fan of eating the dehydrated blueberries as is. BUT once they’re reconstituted, they take on a texture very similar to craisins or raisins that are on the drier side. I would definitely put those on a charcuterie board or several other snacking options. I chose not to drink this reconstitution water, as you can see it looks like colored water. I know I would have been disappointed. It might be a different story if I used hot water instead of room temp and/or I let it sit longer than the 20 minutes that I did (while making my muffin mix).

Now that you’re all caught up on the different berries, lets see all that I made with them. Except for the muffins, all these recipes were new to me over the last month. So I hope you get some inspiration also and try something new!

Blueberry Juice

I needed to make blueberry juice for the kiddo friendly blueberry cordial that I wanted to make for the boys. (They heard that I was making cordial for myself and they wanted some too. So here’s the first stop.)

I’m going to save you the time–DO NOT look up how to make this on YouTube! It’s one of those processes where they all look alike and they all do pretty much the same thing to them. And those who were difference, like one lade added milk, it was just not going to fly for making cordial.

Literally all you need is blueberries and water–that is it!

Here I used 3 cups of berries and 5 cups of water.

It was pretty standard across the board that everyone used about 1.5 cups of water per cup of berries. I could have used less water, but I was happy with the amount of liquid with my immersion blender. Everyone I saw used a stand blender. I’m an immersion blender girl and this all fit perfectly in my glass water pitcher. Clean up was just easier for me. So use whatever blending tool you have. You could even use a hand masher if you wanted to or hand squeeze the berries. The bottom line is that you can drink the pulp if you want that in your blueberry juice. Or you’ll end up straining the pulp out and squeeze everything to get all the liquid out. The water is just a medium to make the process flow.

I am going to include a clink for you here though. One lady I saw used her pressure cooker to make the juice. And then she canned her juice for future use and it’s in its simplest form to meet the need of any recipe you’re looking to use. This was just one project that I didn’t want to undertake on top of everything that I already planned to do for this post. But if you’re a canner, definitely check this video out!

NOTE: In canning groups there is a lot of heat surrounding water bath canning and acidity levels. (“Just because Grandma did it doesn’t mean that it’s safe by today’s cooking standards.”) Cooked blueberries acid levels are below the acid threshold, so it is entirely safe to can cooked blueberry juice without adding acid to the juice before water bath canning.

Blueberry Cordial

For blueberry cordial the pulp does need to be strained out. Just about everyone I’ve seen uses cheese cloth. I happen to have a muslin cloth bag that I use for straining fruits all the time, particularly when I’m making my elderberry syrup. So I opted to skip the cheese cloth and just use my muslin bag. It turns a 2-3 step straining process into just a single step.

After straining, you’re left with a clear blueberry juice.

And if you’re wondering, the juice tastes like the blueberry equivalent of the watered down apple juice I’ve given my boys. It’s not sweet. And is nothing like the fresh blueberries that I used.

But that’s okay, because the Cordial recipe I chose to use is from a British gentleman and his process starts off with reducing the blueberry juice anyway. Here’s his video here.

I followed his directions and reduced it down to half its volume. Taste wise, that watered down flavor is gone. And what remains is an acidic version of the blueberries that I picked.

Here is where I agree with him, the sweetness level of your cordial is very much dependent on your preference levels. My volume of cordial was greater than his, and even after making the proper conversions from metric to imperial I still could not add as much sugar as he did.

With my end volume around twice the amount of his, he added roughly 1 cup of sugar to his cordial. I would have been happy with 1/2 cup of sugar. It was at the level of sweetness as a soda. However, with cordial being syrupy sweet I ended up with a final measurement of 3/4 cup of sugar. And at this level that tasted to me like the really sweet cough syrup. This is definitely a treat that I will add this as a flavoring to unflavored seltzer water for the boys.

And I’m sure that my husband will add this to his seltzer water too.

I’m keeping this in my fridge to keep it preserved for a month or two. But I’m sure it will probably go quick and I’ll need to pull out my freezer berries to make some more.

Spiked Blueberry Cordial

After tasting the blueberry cordial above, I’m now wondering how this one is going to turn out. The recipe for this adult cordial I found here. But I have a few weeks of waiting before I can sample this one and see if any adjustments need to be made. (I will come back into this post and add to my assessment of this recipe once I have this one completed.)

Full disclosure, I do not own a large enough glass container to pull off this full recipe. (That and I didn’t have enough fresh berries that were thawed and ready to go.) So I cut this recipe in half. The proportions were exactly the same, so I know this is going to turn out as it should.

If you want the half batch recipe, this is what I used:

4 cups blueberries
28 oz vodka
1/2 cup sugar

Everything else I followed the directions.

Once this process has run its course, I’ll be back to give my thoughts.

Clafoutis

This recipe, Clafoutis, came my way on Facebook from a friend who was excited to pass this one when he heard that we picked blueberries this year. This is one of his favorite breakfasts and was eager to hear how we liked it.

I admit that I modified this recipe by way of the cooking vessel I used. I opted for my Pyrex because my largest pan is actually my cast iron pan I didn’t know if this recipe was going to expand in the oven or not. So it was my faithful Pyrex with a pan to catch anything that might fall over board during the cooking process.

I’m glad to report that nothing cooked over and it stayed in my Pyrex.

The batter itself reminded me so much of making German Pancakes. (This recipe expands, so now you know why I anticipated some expansion.) In fact, it tasted a whole lot like German Pancakes. The difference, of course, is the addition of blue berries. But also the clafoutis retains more of soufflé like structure. It does puff up and deflates a little after you pull it out and cut it. But on the scale of easy to difficult, this is definitely an easy recipe to make.

It’s super easy to bake and is definitely kid approved. I only made a single batch, but I certainly have to make a double the next time I make this recipe.

I wanted to make a quick note that baking did take longer in the Pyrex and there was the issue of the center being undercooked when time expired. The top was already brown. Because I needed extra cooking time, I did have to add some foil over the top.

If you’ve ever made a quiche, then you understand the jiggle in the center means more cook time is needed. The same is true with the clafoutis. If you see some jiggle, give it more time.

Blueberry Muffins

And now to the blueberry muffins I started off this post with!

Let’s be honest. Everyone and their grandmother have a dozen blueberry muffin recipes they can pull and one or two that they swear by. This is the one that I use, and I don’t even go to my cook books to look there. The problem that I have always had is that they are either too sweet or the moment you add fresh blueberries it turns into a swampy mess. Ina Garten’s recipe I swear was made for fresh blueberries to be added into it. It’s has the perfect amount of water to sponge ratio where your hands don’t get damp and sticky eating it.

So whether you want to use the recipe I use or the one that has been in your family for 70,000 generations here is some information that you can use to improve your blueberry muffin game.

I made one batch of muffin batter. And instead of adding the blueberries into the batter, I put the batter into my silicone cups and then added the blueberries to the color coded cups so I could pull off this ultimate side by side comparison. There was absolutely no way there was any difference in the batter or the sponge. This was entirely based off the berries themselves; fresh, freeze dried, and dehydrated.

In the blue cups I added the fresh blueberries.

The yellow cups have the reconstituted freeze dried berries.

And the red cups have the reconstituted dehydrated berries.

As you can see with this first baked picture, there is an obvious hydration difference between the sponges of the muffins.

The fresh berries, blue cup, are the standard reference point for the recipe that you choose to use. In my preference, the sponge is mildly sweet and firm with enough water content to keep it from being dry.

The reconstituted freeze dried blueberries, yellow cup, added more moisture content to the sponge, but the berries taste and texture wise are the same as the fresh berries. I walked away from this muffin with slightly tacky fingers and some crumb stuck to my fingers.

The reconstituted dehydrated blueberries, red cup, made the crumb dry up a bit. Instead of that perfect balance, it had the feel of what the perfect muffin feels like in a day or two after being baked. The crumb itself is still sweet, the dehydrated berries just took some of the moisture out. That being said, the dehydrated berries were sweeter than the fresh or freeze dried. And they offered a little different texture. You know that cheap box of premade blueberry muffin mix that you can buy at the store? The berry texture is pretty much the same. The berries are bigger than that boxed mix, otherwise there’s a very close comparison there.

If you remember above, my husband said he preferred the yellow cup muffins, freeze dried. I found that all too funny because I still prefer the fresh berry or blue cup muffins. But that just goes to show you just how much it comes down to personal preference.

Decorating with Blueberry Dust

Last but certainly not least, here is the secret baking trick that I alluded to last week!!!!!

The best part about the freeze dried berries is the perfectness about how you can break them down into a decorating powder. Not only is it easy enough to make a decorating powder in seconds. It is also sweet and gives a punch of flavor like you can’t imagine until you try it.

Yes! You can use a spice grinder and turn this into a beautifully fine powder that you can add to your butter cream for a beautiful lavender color with absolutely no food coloring. It also gives an intense blueberry flavor without watering down even your stiff peak frostings or fondants.

In this instance, I just put some crushed freeze dried blueberries into a plastic bag and rolled over it with my rolling pin a few times. Literally anyone can do this!

But my absolute favorite part is just how simplistically beautiful this is. Right here is the blueberry muffin mix from above, cooked in a donut mold. Sprinkled on top is powdered sugar and stripes of the blueberry powder. And finally it’s garnished with edible lavender and whole freeze dried berries.

This is the most beautiful and perfect baked good that I’ve made since having my kids. And it reminds me of the beautiful creativity inside me. It’s not anything spectacular. Because I know there are pastry chefs out there that can make me look like a toddler in my kitchen. But this is a simple wow treat that everyone can make for themselves. And all it takes is finding the products to bring into your basic kitchen and just having some fun.

I hope you try some of these ideas in your kitchen this week!

Products Used Today: This post contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links, but at no extra cost to you.

Thrive Life Freeze Dried Blueberries

Resusable Silicone Baking Cups

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Rolling In Blueberries!!!

This picture was our family’s first time going out to pick blueberries. I have a second berry picking appointment coming up this weekend and I wanted to share with you our experiences and what you can do with any blue-berries that you picked this year. Or if you’ve yet to visit a blueberry farm, than the berries that you can find in your local produce stand or appointment.

This year blueberries were slow to come into season because of our long cold and wet spring in the Pacific Northwest. (In fact, our whole growing season was completely thrown off, not just the blueberries.

Why did I choose to pick our own berries this year?

My youngest two kiddos LOVE blueberries. If my mother in law or we buy a pint of blueberries from the store, these two will gobble them all up while your back is turned making lunch. LOL I wish that were an exaggeration!

My problems with store berries are that produce prices have jumped through the roof so much where I can only afford to buy one fruit, in moderate weight, each time I go to the store. Yes, we’re a family with a tight food budget. And truth be told, blueberry prices make it so that this fruit really isn’t in our range. I can choose a pint of berries or a few bunches of bananas, or a bag of clementines. So If I want to have fruit to last past one meal, you can guess which direction I usually go. And then there’s the problem that when the blueberries are on sale, sometimes I find berries that already turn, or they’re molding in a day or two at home. Again, not cost effective.

So when I saw a social media add for a local blue berry farm, I jumped on the opportunity!

If you know grocery store storage, you know that the fruit you purchase today is already about 3 weeks off of the plant that it grows on. So picking berries ourselves means that they’re the freshest that you can possible get. And you have the bonus of the fruit being picked while ripe, instead of green. (If you know how quickly the vitamins leave your produce once it’s picked, you understand the value of eating your produce as soon from picking as you can get.

Then there is the educational bonus. By taking the boys out to pick, they see where the blueberries come from (not the store refrigeration case), what the blue berry bush looks like, what a ripe berry looks in comparison to a green berry, and what kind of environment it takes to grow blueberries. (Yes, we picked with boots on our feet!)

What do you do with all those berries???

I’m so glad you asked that question!

With my family, the way that we maximize our small grocery budget is by preserving everything that we can for the year. When berries are in season, we store them in a way befitting to how we will use them throughout the year. Apples we make apple sauce. And last year I learned how to can apple pie filling. So in the fall, I can buy the apples at the cheapest price of the year and take care of our apple needs for the year. Black berries, we pick them (for the price of gas to get to our picking location) and have our jam for a year or two for the insane amount of PBJ that we go through in our house.

This is my first year with blueberries to preserve for the year. So I photo documented everything to share with you here. If you decide to hit the berry farms this year before the season ends, you can have an idea on what you want to do with your berries!

Frozen

The first thing my mother in law recommended to use, when she heard of our first trip of picking blueberries, was that they freeze beautifully. And indeed they do!

I took this cookie sheet, and made a single layer of berries. I put them in the freezer to get them frozen and then put them into zip lock bags. I chose the quart sized bags and measured out the berries into 2 cup increments. Most blue berry recipes that I have (and looking at new ones), this is perfect for making a double batch of just about everything. And yes, I always make double batches of everything. With a family of five, with three of them growing, I just overcook to be on the safe side and err on the side of leftovers. And with blue berry muffins, it’s nice to have one baking session with treats for the week.

If I only need 1 cup, then at least I only have a cup of thawed berries in the fridge for the berry thieves to nab!

Dehydrate

The baker in me made me dehydrate. I’ve had many recipes where the juice of the berries was just too much for the sponge and it made a soggy mess! So by taking the liquid out of the berries, you not only save freezer space with this shelf stable preservation but you also keep the right consistency to cakes and muffins.

The problem was what is the right way to dehydrate blueberries?

Before I set up my dehydrator my mother in law had already found a news article that stated the way that you HAVE to do it–but the berries in half.

Now I froze 3 pounds of my berries. And that left me 6 pounds of berries to dehydrate. There was absolutely no way I was going to cut all those berries in half. I’m a mother of 3 after all!

So I performed an experiment.

I left berries whole, with an assumption going into this that they would take forever because of the sturdy berry skins, for one tray. The second tray I filled with berries that were cut in half.

As seen above: whole berries and smashed berries.

For three trays I lightly smashed the berries onto a plate, using a glass cup that I could look through. By using the glass cup you can make sure that you see which berries you are smashing, which ones you already smashed, and just how much pressure you are adding in connection to breaking the skins open. For the smashing, I applied just enough pressure that the skins split open, allowing the air in to dehydrate, and yet keep the majority of the fruit structure intact.

When you look at the pictures above, the whole berries and the cut berries looked the same. So I just put the whole berry picture up. Both of those sets were placed on the mesh insert. I’m done with the days of putting fruit directly on the trays. By using just the mesh I don’t ever have to scrub my trays. Plus the mesh you can fold and break up any of the thin bits that cling to the surface. So even the mesh don’t have to be scrubbed either! The Right picture is the smashed berries. You can see what I mean when I say just enough to break the skin. Some got a bit more flat than the other (which looks a lot like the whole berries on the left). But these berries are a bit messier. I wanted to save the mess and not lose out on any of the blueberry goodness. So I dehydrated these on the jelly roll sheets.

The final two trays of blueberries were my fully mashed berries. I’m teaching myself how to seed save from different plants. My tomatoes are not yet ripe, so I can’t practice on those yet. So I chose to use the blueberries as my maiden voyage. And I’ll talk more about that below!

As you can see below, with the final dehydrated product, the fully mashed berries were a mess, a beautiful, lovely mess! So those of course were on a jelly roll insert.

As seen above: smashed and fully mashed.

The drying time and final products actually surprised me! The smashed and mashed took the least time to dehydrate, as anyone would expect. They took about the same amount of time, 13 hours. (Of course we had very high humidity days, which didn’t help here.) The mashed berries pulled off the jelly roll just like any fruit leather would. So if you want fruit leather you can use a blender or you can skip that extra clean up and just use a plate and glass. Of course the blender will give you the means of smoothing out everything across the jelly roll and produce a nice solid leather you can cut into perfect strips. Or you can go the quick and dirty route and skip the whole cutting process. Either way works and is a complete judgment call.

The smashed berries surprised me. I didn’t think they would turn out as perfect as they did. There was very little flesh spread and it looks nearly identical to how the whole and cut berries turned out, when they finished. These look exactly the same as the dehydrated blueberries in the packets of oatmeal or premade blue berry muffin packages. My walking away point is that for the least dehydrating time and same end product, a light smash is the way to go for dehydrating berries!

What surprised me the most was that the cut berries and the whole berries took the same 23 hours to dehydrate. Cutting the berries didn’t speed along the process for me. Even when I ate a whole berry and a cut berry, their textures were identical. I’m not sure why the article my mother in law read said that you had to cut the berries for the best result. There wasn’t a difference.

However there was a difference between the whole/cut berries vs. the smashed berries. When dehydrated the smashed berries had a little bit of pop corn roughness to it, but it had a bit more “airiness” to them. You could say they had a snap and not as dense feel to the teeth. It wasn’t a completely night and day difference between the three methods. But it was noticeable.

My Vote: a quick smash of the blueberries and dehydrating them is the way to go!

One side product you might not have thought of

Before I end this portion of dehydration, I wanted to talk about this one last observation. I like finding ways of using as much as I can of the things I preserve. And if you’ve dehydrated long enough, especially with the jelly rolls, you know there is always that bit from the juice and fragments of flesh stuck to your tray. This time, I decided on another experiment. I scraped off this little remnant. As you can see in the right picture below, I didn’t gain a whole lot of extra bits off of 5 jelly rolls, but I want you to stay tuned because I use this bit in a recipe below and I want you to know that this is completely usable!

What caused me to go to this effort?

I had to scrape my jelly rolls anyway, to make it quicker for washing when I was all done–no scrubbing. I took a taste of these scrapings. And let me tell you what! These scrapings have just as much flavor as the blueberries themselves. So yes, all that flavor, I was definitely going to cook with that.

Saving Seeds

I have no idea how successful this attempt of seed saving will be. I’m very new to this skill set. Including this batch of blue berry seed, I have three other plant varieties that are in the process of cold stratification.

If you are also new to seed saving, perennial plants do require cold stratification in order to tell the seed that it’s ready to sprout. I only have a small garden so it’s not space effective for me to plant seeds in the fall and let them over winter (cold stratify naturally) and hope they take off in the spring. So the best option for me is to go through the stratification method using my freezer and start the seeds indoors and plant any successful starts.

With blueberries, the methods I’ve seen people use for capturing seeds all involved using a blender and wasting the flesh. As you can imagine, I have no intention of losing berries to waste, so I tried something different.

If you remember above, when I talked about mashing the blueberries I mentioned seed saving. Here is what I did. The mashing broke apart the berries that you would see happen in a blender. The difference is that the flesh, I was able to put in my dehydrator and use it as a food source.

On the plate that I mashed the berries on, I removed the thick flesh and left the juice on the plate. With a silicone spatula, I scraped the juice from the plate into the bows that you see here.

As you can see, there seeds were quite numerous from the several handfuls of berries that I mashed. Definitely the seeds are numerous enough to get me a few starts to plant this spring. And I might have enough to share with others.

The method that I used to separate out the seeds from the juice and bits of flesh was the sluicing method. If you’ve seen a video on how you sluice a pan of gold, you understand the steps that I took here. I didn’t pour in very much water, maybe 1/4 cup of water at a time. I swirled the water in the bowl and let the water separate the juice and flesh from the seeds.

It is true what you hear; the seeds to stick to the bottom of your blender, or in this case your bowl. There will be a few floating seeds, but those are the ones that you don’t want anyway.

I sluiced, in my soup bowl, four or five times until you I got to this last picture of the seeds in the bowl.

From this point I continued in the stratification method that others already show how to do; place a damp paper towel in a zip lock bag, place the seeds on the paper towel, and place in the freezer to start the stratification process. (These are placed in the freezer for a minimum of 90 days for blueberries.)

I know that I’m not going to have any blueberries for five years, but I want to start this process now. And I might have to plan ahead and grown several bushes because I definitely have blueberry lovers on my hands!

Freeze Dried

While I do not have a freeze drier, I so wanted to mention this method of food preservation. This method maximizes on the flavor and texture of the blueberry while maintaining the maximum level of vitamin retention. No other food preservation method tops this method at this moment in food history.

That alone is reason enough, but there is also the added bonus of berries being shelf stable and fresh for up to 25 years, 1 year after opening. If you’ve water bath or pressure canned any preserves, you can recognize the benefit of not having a jar or seal failing you.

Maybe you’re like me and don’t have a freeze drier. I want you to know that you still have that option available to you.

More information on freeze dried blueberries can be found here.

I’m going to talk more about freeze dried berries next week, because I’m going to use these in recipes. And believe me, if you are a professional cake or cupcake baker, you’re going to want to see what freeze dried berries can do for you and your clients. You’re going to have all the berry flavor without throwing your water ratio off. Plus the added bonus of being able to decorate with the berries that you can’t do with fresh and less of your precious time than dehydrating.

Blue Berry Recipe

I wanted to share the blue berry recipes that I have and how each of these ways of preserving blueberries act in a given recipe, but I’ve given you ALOT of information already. So be sure to tune in next week for the recipes and how the berries work.

BUT in the meantime I don’t want to leave you hanging with the jelly roll scraping. So here we go on this quick analysis.

As seen above: the berry scrapings and blueberry pancakes (above: whole dehydrated berries, bottom: berry scrapings)

I didn’t have very much of the scraping, just enough for two pancakes for the boys. I made two other pancakes with the dehydrated berries. (And of course some plain flapjacks for the kiddo who dares to turn his nose up on blueberries.)

The dehydrated berries had a bit of crunch to them, but did not disappoint in the flavor department. The blueberry scrapings I absolutely loved! There was the full blueberry flavor without the bite of a dry blueberry, or even the wet squish of pancakes with fresh berries in them.

I’m so tempted to make more mashed berries and spread it very very thin to maximize the blueberry scrapings, because it’s the absolute perfect world for blueberry pancakes–full flavor without messing up the texture of a classic pancake!

Products seen today

These products are affiliate links. We can receive a commission from purchases made through these links, but at no extra cost to you. These products I have purchased for myself. Where I have talked about them, my statements are based on my experience on these products.

Nesco FD-1018A Garden Master

This was a replacement dehydrator for my other Nesco that served me well for over a decade. I wanted to make this recommendation because this dehydrator came with a mesh and jelly roll for each tray. I was prepared to purchase these accessories, but was so pleased to find out that I didn’t have to.