Enjoy the amazing smells of a Fall Simmer Pot using freeze dried cranberries, oranges, lemons, apples, cinnamon, and star anise. You can add other ingredients as you wish such as rosemary, cardamom, rose petals, etc - the variations are up to you!
Photo above shows the two trays we put together using Citrus, Cinnamon, Apples, and Star Anise.
Each tray will be divided in half and packaged for Family Gifts. We're curious to see how they travel through the mail system and will report back on this. We're not too concerned about breakage since these will be dumped into a crock pot or into a simmer pot on the stove and gently warmed to release all their wonderful aromas.
We sliced the citrus into 1/4" thick pieces and cut the cranberries in half so they would freeze dry more efficiently. We bought a large bag of Cinnamon Sticks online and picked out the smaller ones since they were prettier than the larger ones. We used some Star Anise too. We had a small amount at home already, and found more online. We soaked the apple slices in water with lemon juice to reduce browning while we worked on filling all of the trays.
Photo Below shows 2 of 4 trays being loaded into the freeze dryer. We like to pre-freeze our food items in our downstairs freezer ahead of time. This cuts down on the total run time in the freeze dryer, and saves wear and tear on the machine. We have tray lids so we can stack the trays together vertically in the freezer to maximize the vertical space.
RECIPE: If you already have a favorite Simmer Pot Recipe feel free to use it for Freeze Drying. If you don't have one, here's what we did: We bought 3 Oranges, 6 Lemons, 2 Apples, 1 Bag of Cranberries, and 1 bag of Cinnamon Sticks. At home we already had some Star Anise in the spice cabinet and jars of Freeze Dried Rosemary from our herb garden last summer. We sliced everything up, loaded onto trays, pre-froze in our downstairs freezer, and loaded into our freeze dryer. Since this batch contains a lot of citrus we used a custom tray temp of 95 degrees F. We do this with delicate food items or foods that contain probiotics, live cultures, or enzymes we wish to preserve and protect from too high temps that can damage or destroy them.
When preparing the simmer pot, pour ingredients in along with 3-4 cups of water or apple cider. As the liquids evaporate be sure to monitor periodically and add more water as needed to prevent it from going dry. Simmer pot can be used for up to 4 days, then let cool and discard.
We have a Small Harvest Right Pro Freeze Dryer and all of these sliced up ingredients ended up filling 6 trays. If you only want to do a couple of trays then you can adjust your purchased fruits accordingly.
Once Freeze Dried, we're going to add some Rosemary and perhaps even some Cardamom to the mixture, and pack into some Clear Stand-up Bags (with zip tops that can also be heat-sealed) for Gift-Giving purposes. Seeing all the colorful freeze dried fruits and spices inside the bag will be appealing to eye and make fun gifts! They have a zip top and are also able to be heat-sealed to protect the contents from moisture until it's time to use them. I chose the 5.5 x 7.9" size bags for the simmer pot packets.
If you'd like to use some Clear-front Mylar Bags with fun holiday colors on the back side, then check out Toby Truman's selections - they're so pretty!
This Post will be updated soon as the first 2 of 6 trays are in the Freeze Dryer now! Once completed, we'll package up for gift-giving and add some photos and additional details about our processes.
Here's our link to a gorgeous Clear Glass Simmer Pot that you can use on your stovetop (can also be used to heat soups, etc in the microwave)
You can also use a Small Crockpot on the warm or the low setting. Here's our link to a popular one that has warm, low, and high settings.
Photo Below shows Trays 1 & 2 Before and After Freeze Drying. Planning to use photos of these trays on the instruction cards that will go along with the packets.
Photo Below shows Trays 3, 4, 5 & 6 Before and After Freeze Drying
Photo Below shows the Freeze Dried Ingredients stored in jars and a zip bag temporarily until they can be arranged in the clear plastic stand-up bags.
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.
Photos Below show the completed packets. I decided to make a variety of mixtures so that later recipients can mix and match or double up if using a large crockpot. If using a small pot on the stovetop a packet's worth will fit just fine. The Cinnamon & Rosemary smelled amazing along with all the citrus as I was putting them together. I used Stainless Steel Food Tweezers to reach down deep into the packets to arrange some of the ingredients so they’d be more eye-catching as gifts. These tweezers were much easier to use compared to trying to reach my hand down into the bags and jars to retrieve and then arrange things - I didn't accidentally break any pieces either which was great.
We use our Custom-Built FD Log App to record our Batches and see what's in our Inventory. You can see in these screenshots below, in the Notes area, how much the tray weights dropped in between each dry check. Ultimately 340.1g of water was removed from the Simmer Pot Ingredients on tray 3! What's really interesting to note is that even at dry check #1 all the pieces looked and felt dry, but you can see the the weights continued to drop over the next several hours. This is why we use the Weigh Method to determine dryness - it's measurable - and so far has worked very well for us.
We track all of our batches of FD foods in our FD Log App! It's handy to review past batches of similar food items to see how long they took. It helps us find specific items quickly too since there's a field for the storage location. 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!
Here are some additional photos of our completed packets. Unlike the bags with a solid backing, these clear bags show off both sides which is why we're using them for Gift-giving.
Next year I’ll FD more than just one bag of cranberries since they are so pretty and I ran out of them before I was out of citrus. I only had a small amount of leftover orange and lemon slices that I vacuumed sealed in a jar and set aside for when we use one of the simmer pot packets in our own crockpot.
We will be mailing the packets out to Family members soon. Planning to add a Desiccant before heat-sealing to absorb any moisture that may result from temp changes and potential condensation as they move through the postal system. We have a pack of Desiccants that we bought last year and stored the extras in a vacuum sealed jar - they're still perfect! Did you know that these Food-Safe Silica Gel Desiccant Packets can be Recharged and used multiple times?
Here are the Instruction Cards I'm going to include with each packet - feel free to download a copy to use for your own gift packets!
I will update this post later once we hear back from our Family members about what condition the packets arrived in, and what they thought about them.
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Update: These Simmer Pot Packets were an absolute hit with our Family Members - they loved them! They said that all arrived intact without any broken pieces. This is pretty impressive since they traveled via Priority during the Christmas Package Rush. They said that these packets made their homes smell amazing, and they really enjoyed using them.
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We hope you find this to be Interesting, Informative, and Inspires you to make some Freeze Dried Simmer Pot Gifts of your own!
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