And Now, For Something Completely Different: Experiment Goes Horribly Wrong, Vol. 1, Chapter 1, But I Still Advocate Home Freeze Drying!

If an experiment cannot fail, it is not an experiment. Now I know: NEVER, EVER Freeze Dry Maple Syrup! EVER!!!

This is a Stay Fresh Freeze Dryer. I have one. I love it. Most of the time.

Full Disclosure: After doing my research on which home Freeze Dryer I wanted (Harvest Right? Lanphan? HFD-1? US Labs?) and deciding on a Stay Fresh Freeze Dryer with an Industrial Pump (to create the vacuum which extracts the water from the frozen food (hence, “freeze drying” as opposed to “dehydrating”), I contacted Tim at Stay Fresh Freeze Dryers.

I proposed to him that since I could not afford one of their machines (they cost several thousand dollars and being a full time political activist who lives on a pension and Social Security does not leave room in my budget for one of these exceptional food storage machines), if Stay Fresh gave me one, I would document my learning curve, the good, the bad and the ugly, and share what I learned with my audience.

He considered that for a little while and then, voila!, a Stay Fresh Freeze Dryer arrived at my house. Then, of course, I had to learn to use it.

I must admit I was a bit cowed, but it turned out that the unit itself is easy to assemble and use. There are, however, a number of steps in the learning curve that are worth getting info on before you plunge in. Like NEVER freeze dry maple syrup. Read on to learn why not.

If you want a Stay Fresh Freeze Dryer, by the way, you can get one at $50 off by using the affiliate code “DrRima50” when you order a machine at

https://stayfreshfreezedry.com?sca_ref=6621031.cDsDQqFiwp. I get a small commission, you save some money and you wind up with an exceptional food preservation tool. Now that IS a WIN/WIN. Unless you try to freeze dry maple syryp. Don’t.

OK, back to the point of this post: Food preservation is going to be essential for survival and the kind of home food preservation I like best is freeze drying, which does not require the brutal heat and labor of canning, or the same amount of storage space, and which is an automated process once the food is prepared for processing and placed in the chamber.

Why do I need to store food? For reasons similar to yours, but perhaps with some particular differences. By the way, everything I eat or feed my dogs is Certified Organic, so I am not going to specify that everything is organic, but it is. Being trained in Environmental Medicine, I know far too much about toxicity of food chemicals to eat them!

I have successfully freeze dried ground meat for my dogs (who eat a raw diet and, in the coming engineered food shortages will need a back-up for their diet at some reasonably likely point), fresh onions, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries

(UTTERLY DIVINE!!!),

cherries, mango slices, milk, kefir and a bunch of other foods with varying degrees of success, learning a LOT about the process as I go.

Here is what you should see at the end of a successful freeze drying process:

You should look through the door of the unit and see colorful, recognizable food reduced in volume, but otherwise looking like what you put in at the start of the cycle. Here you can see mango slices and strawberries. They are bright, crunchy, flavorful and shelf stable when protected from light, moisture and oxygen.

But before we go any further, promise me, yourself, whatever gods you pray to and the universe itself that you will NEVER, EVER, EVER, no matter how tempted you are, freeze dry maple syrup. If I were you, I would apply the same caution to agave syrup, honey and the like. If anyone near you suggests it, RUN!

If you are unwise enough to do that (and I was, and spent 8 hours cleaning up the disaster that resulted), This is what will greet you when you return to the unit at the end of its cycle:

And you might think, “Well, OK, that’s nice and light and fluffy and I can just stuff that in mylar bags and it will be great maple sugar.” But you would be wrong because behind the light, fluffy sugar foam (which was, I have to admit, delicious), is a sodden, nearly frozen mass of thick, gelatinous, sticky, tenacious gunk (organic gunk, to be sure, but gunk, none the less) that has cemented the trays to the unit and the unit to the chamber and filled the drain line with maple syrup gunk and covered the walls of the chamber with solidified gunk as well.

I called Tim, the wonderful, patient owner of Stay Fresh and nearly wept, thinking I had ruined my unit. Tim, who answers the phone himself, is patient, kind and did not laugh at me, or did not laugh audibly, at least. When I told him what I was contending with, there was, it is true, an extra-long pause, which suggested that although this was really bad, Tim had heard worse. I hope for Tim’s sake that he has not heard worse because this was truly awful.

Tim and I strategized how to deal with this nightmare. It involved unplugging the unit, figuring out how to loosen the cementing gunk (no small task, I can tell you) protecting the connectors from water, a lot of mopping up of sticky drain water, a bathtub, numerous changes of water for soaking (8, as it happened), a LOT of repeatedly rinsed sponges, a significant amount of non-toxic, but very, very sticky garbage and the waste of 4 liters of beautiful, pure and formerly highly consumable maple syrup. And 8 hours of my time not scheduled for that purpose.

Why, you might ask, did I decide that freeze drying maple syrup was a good idea? Because, in addition to having, like Rudyard Kipling’s Elephant’s Child, insatiable curiosity, I also went on line looking for expertise in this particular subject and encountered a number of scientific articles on doing just that: freeze drying (lyophilizing) maple syrup.

None of the articles, I now realize, was about home freeze drying and not one of them discussed what the lab tech who cleaned up after the experiment had to contend with. Nor did any of them deal with volume of expansion during the process. They all focused on the characteristics of the finsihed product.

OOPS! that is a prime example of being too smart, as my mother would have said, for my own good. Yes, I checked the literature but failed to account for the fact that I have a home unit, built and operated differently than a lab model and vessels and volumes might make a significant difference.

All of that said, I LOVE the freeze drying process. I have learned a huge amount that is fascinating to me and have made quite a number of videos on each step of my leaning journey so far. You know, as I do, that food shortages are being created. Home Freeze Drying is a wonderful solution for long term and reliable storage of light, nutritious, delicious and varied food.

But by far the very best solution is to make sure that the genocidal “contollagarchs” engineering the coming global famine are no longer part of our lives. That requires your action, now.

Take the 10 Million Patriot Challenge at https://PreventGenocide2030.org

Add your voice to all the others pressuring the US Congress to pass the Disengaging Entirely From the UN Debacle Act of 2023 (HR: 6645/S: 3428) now while we still have a chance.

There are 6 simple steps which can, when we use them, literally save humanity. Got 5 minutes for that? Great. Go there right now: https://PreventGenocide2030.org

The freeze drying videos (which I will be posting once I find someone to help me with the editing - might that be you?) will be posted on a special FreedomFood site now in development.

Turns out that there is a good deal to learn and, if done properly, some meaningful record keeping that makes things go better as well as lessons learned on what works better and what does not work so well.

I am more than enthusiastic about this process. To date, however, what works worst is never, ever freeze drying maple syrup.

By the way, re-hydration of freeze dried food is quick, easy and does not require heat, only water, so emergency use is easy.

More to follow. Skip the maple syrup, though.