One of our favorite things about Freeze Drying is that we can make our own meals and snacks using limited ingredients that we choose. When we make our own Peanut Butter at home, we use Peanuts with Sea Salt - that's it - no added sugars or dyes or hydrogenated vegetable oils, etc. like commercially produced peanut butters may contain. The flavor is amazing too!
(Full Video Can Be Found At The Bottom Of This Post)
We have a Vitamix Blender with Tamper that can easily handle making fresh peanut butter. Be sure your blender of choice is rated to handle this type of food.
We used 2 cups of peanuts so we would have our 1 Cup worth for freeze drying as well as some leftover fresh peanut butter to eat. It only took about 2 minutes of blending to produce perfectly creamy peanut butter - yum!
According to the HR App Instructions, the ratio to use for freeze drying peanut butter is 1 part to 4 parts water.
We measured out 1 cup of our fresh peanut butter and set it aside. Next we measured out 4 cups of water from our Zen Water Filter System, and warmed it to 160 F using our Electric Kettle. It has temp control settings, and heats up water super fast - in about two minutes!
We then poured the hot water into our Vitamix, added our 1 cup of peanut butter, and blended for about 10 seconds.
Once diluted, we carried the mixture downstairs, and poured into trays directly in our freezer. This way we didn't have to worry about any spills or trying to balance carrying trays downstairs. We have a shelving unit that provides dedicated vertical space in our freezer to pre-freeze our trays before loading into the freeze dryer. This works very well for soups, raw eggs, etc.
We have a Small HR Pro Freeze Dryer. It's interesting to note that when using the recommended custom settings per the HR App (-20 F Initial Freeze and 120 F Dry Temp) that it took our machine 3 hours to move through the Freeze and Vacuum Freeze Stages, before entering the Drying stage. After 14 total hours, it went into the Extra Dry Time stage. We were then able to do our first Dry Check and tray rotation. I also took some photos:
The Peanut Butter mixture was poured into trays 3 & 4. The photo above was taken just after it switched from the freeze phase into the vacuum freeze phase, and no big poof or mess - hooray! Dilution is indeed the key to success.
The photos Below were taken at the first Dry Check and tray rotation, just after it went into the Extra Dry Time stage (at 14 total hrs at that time). Both trays of peanut butter looked good and smelled good. Then they were put back into the FD to continue their extra dry time.
Every batch of food items you FD will take varying amounts of time based on many factors. Our scale measures to the tenth of a gram, and we don't consider foods to be "Storage-Ready-Dry" until all trays stop dropping in weight. According to our notes in our FD Log App, this particular batch took 43 hours 43 minutes.
You can see that between dry check 2 and dry check 3 this tray dropped 0.1g in weight. This was across 7 hours of time so we were confident that at 43 total hours it was Storage-Ready-Dry.
If you'd like to learn how to custom-build your own FD Log App to track your batches and inventory using your cell phone or tablet, click here to learn more about our online tutorial!
In the photo above you can see how light, fluffy, and crumbly the peanut butter was after freeze drying. Using a metal spatula, the sheet was broken up into pieces, and scooped into a large zip bag.
Using gentle pressure, the bigger pieces were crushed into a powder. We decided not to use our food processor to do this since it was just faster to do it this way and far less to clean up - also we were pressed for time. If you decide to use a food processor be careful not to run for too long or take too long since these scenarios could heat up the powder or introduce moisture from the environment.
Once crushed, and corner of the bag cut open, the FD peanut butter powder was poured into a quart jar (OA was added later and jar was vacuum sealed - we were trying to work quickly and keep the PB as dry as possible while we packaged the other trays of food)
We have Electric Mason Jar Sealer Kits (for Wide-mouth and Regular-mouth jars) that we like to use. Having one upstairs and downstairs makes things easier as we're opening and then resealing various jars in our pantry and FD area throughout the week. Also, if one breaks we still have a spare to use until the replacement arrives. If you have hand or wrist pain, and don't like having to twist the adapter piece on and off, then consider using this Dual-Head Auto-Stop Mason Sealer instead - it has dedicated ends for both regular and wide mouth lids and doesn't require an adapter piece.
In the photo below you can see us trying out our FD Peanut Butter as an ice cream topping - it was delicious! It can also be used in sauces, protein shakes, smoothies, various baking recipes, toppings for other foods like cakes, pies, pancakes, waffles, etc.
It's also interesting to note that one cup of our homemade peanut butter ended up filling a quart jar once freeze dried and powdered.
Here's Our Video:
https://youtu.be/P3-cMPMZD5M
We hope you found this to be Interesting, Informative, and Inspires you to freeze dry some peanut butter of your own very soon!
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