Freeze Drying Grapes: A Tasty Snack for Food Storage and Prepping 🍇🥶 

Per Harvest Right, do not take your trays out cold. Cold equals moisture (you never want your trays to be cold when taking them out of the Freeze Dryer at the Cycle End). Also in the Harvest Right Freeze Drying Book (which I have) says that Grapes will still be a bit Chewy due to the Sugar Content. Hope this helps. Your Grapes are fully Freeze Dried, but always make sure your Trays are warm (Not Cold) when you take them out of the Freeze Dryer per my Conversation with harvest Right.

John in Bibs has a fantastic video on freeze drying grapes, he blanches them first with no cutting or piercing - works perfectly!

Small fruit like grapes or cherry tomatoes can quickly be cut by placing them on a plate and then inverting a second plate on them and then slicing through the space between the plates. Same sort of idea as the slicing tube you mentioned but uses tools you already have. Just make sure your knife is long enough to span the distance across the plate and is sharp enough to cut the fruit without shredding them.

Tasty ❤

So yummy!

Such a tasty on the go snack.

So glad I found you thank you for giving us inspiration ❤❤❤❤

OmG I can’t wait to do this 😍

I want to try those

Put your grapes on a large serving plate, add another plate on top, pressing gently to keep them from popping out, take a long knife and slice through them long ways between the plates.

As a person that doesn't have a HR but has done a lot of research on them/watching videos/etc, grapes do have a high water content and just needs more dry time so i dont think you did anything wrong juat different expectations. Also, just remember any moisture in your product will have a higher likelihood of spoilage. Oxygen and moisture are the 2 killers of food from freeze drying.

John in Bibs channel show on one of his videos that he blanches his grapes because of the skin. He says its makes the hold their flavor.

Greetings from Norway. You live in a beautiful place. :) I just had an idea, that how you freeze fruits could be important. Something you could try, was to freeze either alcohol or water saturated with salt and then put the grapes in. The point is that this will flash freeze the grapes, giving no time for ice crystals to ruin the texture, which may be what's happening if they get chewy rather than crispy. I haven't tried it. It was just an idea. :)

How do you decide what settings to use?

i DO FROZEN GRAPES I FREEZE THEM FOR 24 HOURS THEN i FREEZE DRY THEM FOR 2 Days. cutting t hem in half helps alot. if my fruit doesn't always freeze well like lemons I just finish them off in my regular dehydrator.

Would it have helped to prefreeze the grapes?

Can you post the food saver link you have? Thanks

When you take them off the vine they will have holes

butter powder

try placing your grapes face down.

I realize you are growing your channel. And you’re very friendly and want to be helpful. But in this video you do a disservice to folks new to FDing. You’re doing grapes and you only set extra dry time to 6 hours, when you could set that to 24 hours to give you a greater window not to have to so closely watch the process. Then when you check them with about 1.5 hours left in the extra dry time, you don’t press Cancel but you touch the leaf. Maybe the same result but why. Pressing Cancel does not cancel the whole batch. You say you’re going to pause the process and check to see if done. But how do you check? With your fingers and tasting? You continue the batch adding 9 hours. Again you could have added longer so the extra dry time doesn’t run down before you wake. Obviously the next time you checked the batch you saw “Process Complete” on the display which means the extra dry time had run out, the pump was off, and the heating pads stopped coming on so then ice wouldn’t melt and ruin the batch. The worst error was checking the food before warming the trays or at least adding 3-4 more hours and then checking the trays when warm. You realize the grapes are feeling dryer, but if you are someone who checks for cold spots, you can’t because all the trays are cold. You never store cold food! And you admit that if you don’t get the food out before the extra time runs out that the machine does Re-freeze. And that’s one way to say it. But from the time you start the whole process, the machine is freezing and never stops until you end the batch. I state above what happens when the extra dry time runs out. And a new person should know that because the trays are still cold, you cannot store the grapes yet. So you don’t have full success. These are best for snacks but not long term. So I wonder if any batches you’ve done are fully dry because you are guessing. I FD mostly long term so I can’t guess. I have to prove full dryness. I keep the extra dry time at 24 hours. During extra dry time, and not until the mTor is at least at 200 or lower, I pause and do an initial weight check in grams. Then I set extra set time to 24 again, mainly because of my busy schedule. I might check and weigh again at 5 hours or 8 or more. But at some point the weight stops dropping. And if seeds I go 5-6 hours more. But this is PROVING not guessing.