A freeze dryer is an expensive investment, and whether you should buy one is heavily dependent on a few simple factors. We weighed the pros and cons of a freeze dryer for years before we bought ours, and we have zero buyer’s remorse, but our situation may be different than yours. First, let’s touch on the benefits of a freeze dryer before we highlight the most critical considerations.
Benefits:
Storage Life
Long Life storage is the hallmark of freeze dried foods. Freeze dried foods can be stored for years, and even decades if put away correctly. This means you won’t
Food Quality
Freeze dried foods retain their nutritional content and texture better than any other preservation methods. Whether you enjoy freeze dried goods in a freeze dried state like a crunchy snack, or rehydrate freeze dried foods, you don’t lose texture or nutrients in the process. Canning for example over cooks foods, makes them mushy, and leaches nutrition into the liquid used in the canning process.
Versatility
A freeze dryer can preserve everything from sliced fruits and vegetables, to soup stocks and entire preserved meals. You’ll eliminate the need for buying flavorless, ready made and over priced backcountry meals if you are a backpacker or backcountry hunter. Additionally, you can preserve large volumes of summer herbs for year round use. Soup stocks can be pulverized into a powdered form so that you can have instant soup stock anytime you’d like. Freeze dried foods are also lightweight, and reduce storage space, since you extract moisture in the process – and water weight adds up!
Convenience
Freeze dried foods are easy to rehydrate and use, and with the water extracted, take up less space and are significantly lighter than a jar of the same food item. Your pantry shelving won’t sag under the weight of freeze dried foods, and you’ll have significantly more pantry space.
Considerations:
Intended Use
Are you already spending money on canning supplies, like jars, lids, vinegar, salts, or bags and sealed containers for dehydrated goods? Do you do large enough volumes of food preservation that you have also invested in shelving to store those goods? If you already do a lot of these alternative food preservation methods and use a lot of space to store preserved foods, then a freeze dryer makes sense. If you only do small volumes of food preservation and don’t store goods for more than a few months, it would be hard to justify setting up and owning such an expensive appliance.
Cost
A Harvest Right freeze dryer is not the cheapest appliance you will buy. In fact, the most affordable ones are over two thousand dollars, and we’d highly recommend finding a sale and investing in at least a medium sized model. We waited for a huge sale at our local farm supply store, and got a significantly discounted large size for close to the price of a small one. We have ample room to do large batches of foods, whereas the smallest model really wouldn’t satisfy our needs, and we’d likely have remorse.
Setup and Maintenance
Our freeze dryer required a dedicated 20 amp circuit, so we pulled electrical wire from our panel to an outlet in a nook in our laundry and utility room. This would incur a little more cost if you don’t have the skills to do this yourself, and hire an electrician. We also build a nice stand for ours, with plenty of space around it for good airflow. Lastly, vacuum pumps and freezers consume quite a bit of electricity, so you’ll see it in your electrical bill. Our model also requires that the vacuum pump oil gets replaced every 25 to 40 batches, adding about twenty dollars in cost at every oil change.
Final Thoughts
If you have more than a couple hundred square feet of garden, and actively preserve the foods you grow and livestock you harvest, then you’ll benefit from a medium or large sized freeze dryer. If you are like us, or any other homestead or small farm, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without a freeze dryer.