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In our family, we all seek natural ways to take care of our bodies and our health. Freeze dried raspberry powder is known for multiple health benefits to include:
- Antioxidants, such as Vitamins C and E, selenium, beta carotene, lutein, lycopene, and zeaxanthin, and let’s not forget about flavonoids! Antioxidants help the body eliminate toxic substances that come from external sources like unhealthy foods and pollution.
- Fiber. Who doesn’t need fiber!? I love fiber and on keto, I need all the fiber I can get. Fiber can help manage or prevent health issues such as blood pressure, obesity, cholesterol levels, heart disease, and stroke. As most everyone knows, fiber helps with digestion, cancer prevention, and helping with diabetes.
- Potassium. One cup of raspberries contain 186 mg of potassium. That’s a great source and it’s delicious.
Healthy is great, but taste is better!
After all the healthy benefits are covered, you have to go with the biggest reason to love raspberry powder – the taste it brings to whatever it’s added to. Rhonda, my mother-in-law, uses raspberry powder in smoothies and other things. In fact, she contributed the images and the information for this post! I just get to try the product when she’s done. Lucky me!
Freeze dried raspberry powder is very versatile. Add your powder to dishes like pancakes, frosting for flavor and color, cake mixes, waffles, breads like banana bread, cookies, and like I said above, smoothies! Rhonda also likes to add the freeze dried raspberry powder to hot chocolate, ice cream, kefir, yogurt and more (sometimes it needs a little sweetening).
Why would you do powder?
Freeze drying raspberries into a powder turned out to be a necessity. If you could only see the abundance of berries in Rhonda’s garden, you’d understand why this was important for her to do. She started out by pureeing raspberries in 3 1/4 cup portions (enough for a batch of freezer jam) and put them in FoodSaver bags in the freezer. These bags lie flat and freeze nicely, stacking in beautiful packets that are ready to be used at a later time.
Even with Rhonda’s generosity in giving many of her frozen bags of raspberry puree away to family, she still found that the ones she kept at home were taking up valuable freezer real estate. After she got the freeze dryer, she decided to free up some space by freeze drying some of the puree into raspberry powder.
Amazingly, 2 of the filled frozen bags of puree fit perfectly on each tray.
The FoodSaver bags are tightly packed and then devoid of extra air. This makes for a solidly frozen product to put into the trays.
***She also uses these bags for other things like ground burger.
Look at how awesome those look on those beautiful silicone mats. These are pre-freeze drying.
Out of the eight blocks of frozen puree that Rhonda put in, most of them were completed after about 35 hours (she selected not frozen, liquid before selecting start).
You might need more time
A few needed a little more drying time which she could tell because she touched the tray and found some spots to still be cool. Something that dense (with all the seeds) needed to turn the blocks about halfway through because the bottoms weren’t getting dried.
The blocks freeze dried solid and then she put them into a large mixing bowl and used a masher to pulverize the block into the fine powder.
You can see the beautiful color in this powder. It’s not hard to see why you would want to use this for any number of items as stated above.
Jam during the end of the world?
Jam would be a great way to reconstitute raspberry powder. Just add sugar, lemon juice, and a small amount of water to see make a jam from the powder. That’s one thing that is always delicious to have on fresh bread and with all the raw wheat we have, we’ll need something to eat on it.
Your own health syrup
Also, to utilize the nutrients, minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants, it would be a good idea to add this to a jar of honey. Use a 1:1 ratio to make a preventative homemade multivitamin source. Who wouldn’t want to have raspberry flavored honey to swallow instead of those crazy horse-sized pills we try to swallow? I know I’d vastly prefer it!
When you’re packing this, you might try measuring out a set amount you would use as serving sizes. 1/4 cup servings are great sizes. Then store them in smaller bags with smaller oxygen absorbers. These ones I’m recommending have a bottom that will stand up without having to lean something.
If you have Mylar bags coming out your ears, you can try jars or separating sections into your Mylar bags with your sealer. Don’t forget to use smaller oxygen absorbers in the made pockets.
One of my favorite places to get Freeze Dried Raspberry Powder (before I had a freeze dryer) was at Harmony House Foods. Click here to visit Harmony House Foods, Inc.
What are some ways you can think of to utilize freeze dried raspberry powder? We would love some suggestions! What do you think about this option?
How do I freeze dry raspberry powder?
Many people think it’s next to impossible to do the freeze drying for themselves. This is far from factual. Freeze drying at home is made easy by Harvest Right. They sell three different sizes of freeze-drying machines that do everything in the machine – except prep and package.
That’s up to you.
For all intents and purposes, here at Freeze Drying Mama we use the medium sized freeze dryer. You can check out the sizes offered at Harvest Right here.
What this machine does is first freeze the items on stainless steel trays to -41 degrees or lower. This takes about 10 hours or so.
Then a vacuum pump turns on and creates a vacuum inside the drum. This is the drying stage and will vacillate the heat of the tray up and down to a pretty warm temperature. This makes the frozen items release any water in them in vapor form. The vacuum sucks the moisture to the drum and this collects in ice form on the inner circle of the drum.
Then there’s the final dry which is essentially the same thing, but with a time associated with it and an end in sight!
What settings do I use for freeze drying raspberry powder?
On the Harvest Right freeze drier – this works on all sizes – after putting the trays inside the drum on the shelves, I put in the drum cover and then tighten the handle as I lock it shut. On the computer touch screen, I selected START > LIQUID > NOT FROZEN > CONTINUE. I walked away after inputting the settings and making sure my drain tube was closed.