Mushrooms & Blueberries

Yesterday evening the freeze dryer finished the load of blueberries and mushrooms.

The mushrooms filled five quart jars and the blueberries filled one quart jar. This was the first time I’ve freeze dried blueberries whole and they are so delicious! It’s like candy. I’m betting once Vince tastes them, he will be wanting to keep the freeze dryer running with blueberries.

Any time I open one of the jars, I’ll just dump out what I need (or want), then vacuum seal them shut again. For the mushrooms, I will mostly use those in gravies or add them to rice dishes and usually 1/2 cup is about all I’ll use.

I have more blueberries to freeze dry but I’m going to freeze dry eggs first because they’re faster and I have a lot of them. Also, I whip the eggs, pour them onto the trays and then have one big slab of eggs. The blueberries – I can freeze them in single layers on trays, then put them into bags in the freezer and once the freeze dryer is done with all the eggs, I’ll just pour out frozen blueberries onto the trays. I have a plan and it should work.

The freeze dryer does have a heated defrost cycle but the room was fairly warm so I closed the door to the room, left the freeze dryer door open and it was completely defrosted before I went to bed so I loaded up the four trays of frozen eggs and got it going again. Those will hopefully be ready by Friday mid-day so I’ll get four more trays of eggs in the freezer to be frozen solid and ready to go into the freeze dryer then.