How To Freeze Dry Ice Cream Treats

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I love Freeze Dry Ice Cream Treats

Well, if you’ve been digging around the rest of the site, you’ll have seen a couple of my other freeze dried treat posts. This one is dedicated to ice cream treats. This is one of those fun freeze dry ice cream treats that you just want to lick the screen! At least I do. Just me? Moving on.

I. Love. Ice. Cream.

I wish I could scream that at the top of my lungs. We literally have one of our stand-up freezers half-full of ice cream treats; keto, sugar free, light, and Umpqua – yes, Umpqua is in a league of its own. If you’ve ever had it, you understand why. Ammiright?

In this specific batch, I did our favorites. Well, okay, I did MY favorites. I figure since the rest of the family isn’t that particular (they’ll literally eat anything that might kind of resemble ice cream), then it’s okay if I’m picky about what I put in the food storage or our stash of dirt biking/hunting/camping treats.

And I went for fun stuff.

Freeze Dried Unicorn Poop

Okay, so this ice cream is actually called Unicorn Sparkle. It’s through Great Value (WalMart’s generic brand). I’m obsessed with it. ObSEssed.

I’m not kidding. It tastes like cake batter and has multiple colors riddled through it and THEN there’s a ribbon of glittering frosting with sprinkles through it.

Let me tell you. This was worth experimenting.

How I Made Unicorn Poop

First, I scooped it into my silicone molds (the mini cupcake molds). And I put that into the freezer.

My mistake: I put it in my pull out freezer and left it overnight. Stupid me. My kids continued opening and closing that freezer all evening and then one of the kids left it partially open. COME ON! So the next morning, the ice cream wasn’t as hard as I needed it to be. That’s okay. Here’s where my mistake is – I was cocky and was like, Nah, no big deal. It will work just fine.

Correction: It did NOT work out just fine. Oh, well. Lesson learned. Next time, the mold will go into the deep freezer for a full 24 hours.

They really are as messy as they look.

When pulling them out of the molds, ugh. It was a mess. Again, it would have been better, if I’d waited until they were solidly frozen. On a side note: Aren’t they pretty?

You can see they’re already kind of melty here on the tray before they go in the freeze drier.

I definitely put them on a silicone mat. Highly recommend that.

Look at the mess that they came out as.

Sigh.

They’re not as pretty as I originally put them on the trays, but you know what? I broke them up into brickle looking chunks and the kids and I ate most of them. Yeah, most of them didn’t even make it into the mylar or jars. It was… so satisfying. I loved them.

We call them Unicorn Poop. This looks like a lot of poop, too!

Freeze Dried Ice Cream Sandwiches

I love. Love. Love Ice cream sandwiches. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say I have an obsession with all things ice cream. Ice Cream sandwiches though are life long favorites. They’re like ice cream stuffed Oreos. Don’t you think?

I did two different kinds here – Vanilla and chocolate split and then original. I ALSO added in the Fat Boy Strawberry ones because… Fat Boys are massive and the kids love them.

I cut them into smaller pieces for two reasons: To make them more manageable for the freeze drier and then for ease of packaging.

 

Before going into the freeze drier.

After the freeze drier. Look at how flaky they look!

Before cutting!

I cut them in quarters. I like how square they are.

So cute! I love them. Before the freeze drying.

Look at how pretty those are!

Freeze Dried Ice Cream Cones

Who doesn’t love Drumsticks? All that chocolate and nuts and wafery goodness! I want to eat them right now.

Best practice is to cut them in half long ways, make a huge mess, but it was fun to clean up. I made sure to put them ice cream side up so they could be fully exposed for freeze drying.

Don’t these look fun? Yeah, They really do. But here’s the thing. Here is the really SAD thing.

These did NOT work out.

What Went Wrong?

Why? The chocolate didn’t freeze dry. I knew chocolate wouldn’t but for some stupid reason I was thinking this chocolate was magic chocolate or something. I don’t know what I was thinking honestly.

It was melty on the silicone mats after being freeze dried.

The meltiness is weird. It would ruin anything in the mylar bags or jars. So, I gave all of the halves to my kids and they all loved them. Oddly enough, they said they were more filling than the normal cold ones. Isn’t that weird? I’ll take it, though.

Summary:

Ice cream sandwiches worked the best in keeping its form and shape, normal ice cream needs more care to get some kind of shape to stick, kind of like raw eggs or soup. I highly recommend testing out the things you are interested in doing before committing too much money.

HOW DO I FREEZE DRY ICE CREAM TREATS?

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. 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 TO FREEZE DRY ICE CREAM TREATS?

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 > FROZEN > 30 MINUTES TO PRE-FREEZE > CONTINUE. After inputting the settings and making sure my drain tube was closed, I walked away.