When I made the Eggplant Dressing Sunday, I used the last of the celery in the fridge. I have some that I canned and I had one quart jar left that I had freeze dried back in 2019. I didn’t really need any groceries but went to the Walmart app and was going to put celery in my cart. I was planning to get 9 packages because that should be enough for three loads in the freeze dryer. The celery was $2.36 cents a package at Walmart. I said . . no, thanks!
Later Vince said he needed to go to town so I asked him if he would check the prices on celery if he went by Aldi and if it was less than $2/package and it wasn’t a wimpy package, would he please get me nine packs of celery. It was $1.23 per package so he got the nine packs.
I had remembered seeing a video where someone had purchased 50 pounds of washed, sliced, frozen celery from Azure Standard for $107 but I didn’t know how long ago that was. I went to Azure’s website and found that the 50 pound package is now right at $114, or $2.28 per pound. By the time I add the extra 8.5% for transportation costs, it would be about $2.47 per pound.
I washed, trimmed and sliced two of the packages of celery, separately and weighed them and from each package, I got a bit over 2 pounds of good celery so I’m paying about 60 cents per pound – even though I have to wash my own and slice it. The only thing frozen I’ve purchased from Azure Standard were cherries and they were pretty much completely thawed by the time I got them. Even though the Azure celery is organic, I’ll stick with the Aldi celery.
I took one of the plastic wash tubs and cut the ends off three packs of celery while sitting down, then I got up and washed it all, sat back down and ran it through the hand crank slicer, and while sitting, I loaded all the trays, then got up and took them downstairs to the freeze dryer and got it going.
First load is in the freeze dryer – started it yesterday about 2 p.m. My guess is that it will be done either Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning.
Then I did the same thing again and put the second load in the freezer to pre-freeze. It really wasn’t that hard doing most of this while sitting.
So nice to have space in the freezer to pre-freeze these trays. That will help the freeze drying process go a bit faster.
The room where I have the freeze dryer is one of the “real” basement rooms – completely underground and three sides are concrete, plus there’s concrete over the top of it because it’s connected to the safe room. When I went in to start the freeze dryer, it was 62 degrees in there. In Texas, the freeze dryer was in a closet in the sewing room and I had not planned on having it when I designed the sewing room so there wasn’t an air conditioner vent in there. The freeze dryer generates a lot of heat so it was almost always too hot in the sewing room for it to be running. I’m guessing once the temp in that room will get up to about 75 but I went ahead and opened the a/c vent in there. I don’t worry about it getting too hot but the cooler it stays, the more efficiently the freeze dryer will run.
I’m going to try to run at least two loads of green onions, two loads of sliced bell peppers and three or four loads of sliced carrots. Considering that it takes several days per load, we’ll just have to see how the green onions and bell peppers hold out til I can get them processed. They’re all getting ready faster than I can do anything with them.