Freeze Dried Sweet Potato Pie Filling

The pie filling project has been completed. It was a lot of work, more work than most of my freeze drying projects, but I have filling for 20 pies.

By the time you figure I don’t have to:

• Buy the sweet potatoes
• Boil the sweet potatoes
• Mash the sweet potatoes and mix together all the other ingredients

x 20, it is a huge net time savings.

Here’s a little recap:

I boiled 15 pounds of sweet potatoes.

Then slipped the skins off, mashed them with the remainder of the ingredients. Once the potatoes were peeled, and bad spots were cut away, I ended up with about 12 pounds of mashed sweet potatoes.

Including 32 eggs:

The ingredients were all mixed well. I added everything for the pie except the butter. When I rehydrate the powder, I’ll add melted butter at that time. For those who do not freeze dry, the oils can be problematic with freeze drying and there’s no real advantage to adding it in before freeze drying. This is the pie recipe I used.

Then it was poured into 8 trays, which is two loads in my medium Harvest Right. In hindsight, I would have divided it up on 12 trays and made three loads. The weight was right at capacity for both loads and the dried filling was thick enough that I had a hard time breaking it up with my hands. Thinner filling would have been much easier to work with.

As each load was finished, I broke up the pieces of dried filling and put it into the blender to make a powder. Even breaking up the filling into very small pieces, I could only get about 3 oz. into a pint jar. I might could have gotten the entire 7 oz. of filling into a quart jar but it would have been a waste of quarts since 7 oz. of powder easily fit in the pint jars.

While I have not yet tried reconstituting and using the filling for a pie I’m confident it will produce a perfect pie or even sweet potato casserole.

One I have baked a pie, I will do an additional blog post.