Bought one almost two years ago. I just now have started playing with it. Kind of a joint project with my brother. He's heavy into organic gardening.

So far we've been experimenting with meats.

My intention is to make our own "Mountain House" type meal packets, for current outdoor use and for longer term emergency food for our families.

Just curious if any of you are doing the same or know good resource material (or links) for good recipes.

Thanks.

I don't own one but I do know that if you freeze dry Skittles they will last less than an hour if you've got kids in the house.

Exact same if you have a dehydrator and deer jerky.

I’m trying to decide on which one to get.  Medium pro or small pro.   Last year I joined a few giant fb groups with a lot of traffic.  But I delayed, partly because I’m still trying to decide on a chamber style vacuum sealer too.   The one I want is too big. I don’t have room for it.

I love mine.  Its a  large  harvest right.  I have had no problems with it, but from the forums, some have had some issues.  I love FD okra.  We eat them like potato chips.  Also I have been doing like you said.  Home grown mountain house.  Turkey and dressing, pinto's and sausage, potato soup, lots of options.  I just make a big pot, let it cool during the day, put in trays and in deep freeze over night and drop in the FD the next morning.  The FD will do all the work, but prefreezing takes a lot of load off of it.

Have also done squash, blueberries (questionable results for me), lots of use around the garden.  Haven't done much meat, but in the plans this year.

Oh yeah, ice cream sandwiches are another big hit with the kids!!

Doc

we use ours all the time for Eggs and milk from our dairy goats.
We also do lots of pre cooked chicken breast, burgers, and other meats.

my neighbor has done sliced pizza and it was easy to reheat and eat.

ours has paid for itself and we now only buy commercial freeze dried stuff that is hard to do or really cheap on clearance.

Such a great machine

How does your milk turn out? Doesn’t the raw have too much fat?

Currently have blueberries in for the first time.

We’ve done: cheese, skittles, laffy taffy, broccoli, eggs and corn.

Blueberries were a real challenge for me.  I think between the high humidity here and the high sugar content, it made it hard to get them to a low enough moisture contend to start with, and they seemed to just suck it out of the air.  Don't mess around between opening the machine and packaging!!

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

Doc

it's been good, the goat milk does have some fat as well as when I get whole milk on sale
I have to mix it well but then it's just like regular milk.

I have tested a few that were two years old and not issues so far. I even froth the milk for latte's

I had one bad one that I vacuum packed in a mason jar that had a used lid and it tasted metallic. It was from a big batch and multiple jars and mylar bags.
We generally mylar and 02 absorbers in vacuum seal

I'm thankful for this thread and the replies.

I'm planning on doing some cleaning and organizing in my garage this spring to make room for a Harvest Right machine.

I would like to experiment some with random foods, but by in large I would like to freeze dry prepared meals and store them in small mylar bags.

I've bought plenty of Mountain House meals in the past, and the prospect of being able to create my own at home appeals to me.

We have had one for going on 4 years now... A medium Harvest Right.  We don't use it as much as we first did.. Frankly we started running out of room for all the stuff we were FDing.  We mostly use it now in the summer and fall when we can get produce in bulk for cheap.  We will do some eggs now and then when the girls are working overtime.  

We have done just about anything you can imagine... some good some bad.  

Lately we have been doing candy to sale in small quantities.  As stated above skittles are a big hit!!  I also like doing ice cream sandwiches they are usually a big hit too...

Large fresh seedless grapes are awesome, cut them in quarters and once done they are really crisp and almost candy like.  

I did and experiment once with burger.  I was looking at the price of MTN House #10 cans and wondered what it would cost to do my own.  I go 2 3# packs of burger and cooked them. I was like 73/27 and once cooked 3# reduced to 1.5# (won't buy fatty meat anymore)  After cooking I drained the fat and rinsed it with hot water for good measure.  Patted it dry and stuck it in the freezer.  The next morning I got the FD ready and stuck it in...

The Burger..
20200824_180012 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr

Tray 1:
20200824_175830 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr

Tray 2:
20200824_182211 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr

Results...(don't mind the dirty scale the wife was baking)
20200826_184807 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr

20200826_184950 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr

Other than the fact that fatty meat loses almost half its weight when cooked..... 3 # of hamburger meat turned into just over 8 ounces of finished product.

We love ours for sure and I think it was and still is a worthy investment.

I also built a filter system to keep the oil clean... it works great....

20200504_124717 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr

20200503_200903 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr

20200505_231615 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr

20200505_231608 by sky_soldier_82nd, on Flickr


I used the same oil for almost a year and never had any issues.  I just drained the water every now and then... I have saved a butt load of money just in oil...

I also use the Dairyland vacuum oil...

My honest advice?

Skip the premade meals-for now.


The two hardest things to replace in your diet in a SHTF will be fat and protein. You can’t do anything about fat with a freeze drier, but meat is one of the easiest things to run in a freeze drier, raw or cooked. Hit the grocery sales hard, ground beef is versatile in cooking-get 90/10 when you can. Chicken always goes on sale and there are a ton of dishes you can prepare with it-Costco/Sam’s Club chicken is a GREAT way to go for the ease of processing and taste (and you get the bones to make soup with while freeze drying). Pork loin is cheap, steak on sale today will be a LOT cheaper than normal price 10 years from now etc. Finally, make a lot of batches of eggs. Blend them up, and use the blender to powder them up-a case if 60 eggs takes up an alarmingly small bag to hold them but you can use them in your cooking or make scrambled eggs that are difficult to tell from fresh.

For the fat, just get vegetable oil and lard. While not cheap, they are cheap enough to rotate and can be used for oil lamps when they are too rancid to eat.


Once the meat needs have been met, get a large stash of frozen vegetables and run them thru the machine. When that is done, pasta dishes are cost effective and fast to dry when you are ready to move on to prepared meals…. And by all means freeze dry your leftovers.


The important thing is to keep the machine running-it’s harder than you think to stay dedicated to running, packaging, and maintaining the machine. Find ways to run batches that require less work in processing-which is why I suggested the frozen bags of vegetables…. No prep.

Put a batch of raw eggs in ours today.  When done, we will use the food processor to chop it all into a powder then put in mylar bags.  You really can't tell the taste from a fresh egg.

I have 12 lbs of beef chili no beans drying at the moment.
I would go with the medium its the most popular for a reason.

ETA I sell them in my store.

My brothers and I just picked one up. I don't know squat about anything. This should be fun.

add extra dry time so you can package everything up at your leisure

you cannot over freeze dry anything so if you're not absolutely certain something is completely dry, let it go longer

never take the machine's word that whatever you're doing is dry

We are saving up for one and trying to educate ourselves on what it can and cannot do.

Mother in law does

Fruits are my favorite.
Pineapple
Banana
Strawberries

Out of the blue, over the weekend, my wife stated that she thinks we need to buy a freeze dryer.  It appears that most in this thread have the Harvest Right.  Is this the best brand or are there others we should look at?

Sorry for the late reply-

There are not too many options for freeze dryers, basically Harvestright and a new competitor. Don’t know anything about the competitor, but HR has had QC issues since Covid. It looks like that is clearing up but I don’t know for sure.


HR is more likely to be around in 10 years, other than that I don’t know what to tell you.

Good to know.  Thanks for the response.

Last year our HR wasn't getting the proper mtorr to freeze dry. I tried all the tricks like taping any connections where there could be leakage. Turns out that it was actually a software issue. If you or anyone else has a similar problem, email customer service. They send you a file, download it onto a flash drive and stick it in the HR.

Did some packing of freeze dried fruit the other day. My brother has been messing with it some and has freeze dried pasta completed last week.