Freeze Dried Fruits | Review

Are freeze dried fruits even good?

Abstract

My first experience with freeze dried fruits was through Special K Red Berries cereal. The freeze dried strawberries are what make the Special K cereal delicious, especially when serve with milk. I ended up picking them out of the box and eating them. Yes, I am the kind of person who would pick out the freeze dried marshmallow in the Lucky Charm. When Trader Joe’s started carrying a varieties of freeze dried fruits, I decided to do taste test them all. Overall results, out of the four freeze dried fruits: apples, strawberries, bananas, raspberries, and blueberries, the apples are my favorite and in my opinions tasted the best out of the four. The freeze dried bananas tasted the most similar to the fresh bananas.

Introduction (References: 1 & 2)

Freeze dried fruits are fruits that undergo the freeze drying process. This process removes moisture such a water from the fruit. The food is frozen and placed into a strong vacuum, which causes the water to sublime and vaporize from ice to vapor quickly. Freeze drying technique is commonly use in the food industry to preserve food and made food last longer such as: instance coffee and astronaut ice cream.

There are many ways to preserve the fruit lifetime. For example, pickling and dehydrating techniques are great ways to preserve fruits like lemons and persimmons, so why choose freeze drying technique. Here are the breakdown of their pros and cons.

One of the pros of freeze drying technique is that it removes the moisture from the food so quickly that it prevents the food from having time to deform from its original shape. This technique allows the food to absorb moisture quickly, which explains why most emergency food are fried dried. In comparison to dehydrated technique, the process is also shorter, requiring less time. Freeze dried food have longer lifetime if sealed in a package that is unopened, and weight light.

Dehydrating technique is time consuming as the process is of removing the moisture from the food is slow. One pros of using this technique is that the food inside of a package doesn’t immediately goes bad once opened. As long as the unused portion is not wet, then the food can still be preserve. This technique does not remove all of the moisture from the food, thus the shelf lifetime is not as long as freeze dried food. Dehydrated food will also lack the crunchy flavor that freeze dried technique food has, but will have more of a similar flavor to its natural flavor.

Hypothesis

I predict that all the fruit flavor will remain similar to their original fruit flavor without the juicy flavor. In regarding to the sweetness flavor, I think the freeze dried fruit will be be less sweet as most of its sugar, that are dissolved in its juice, have been removed during the sublimation state.

Method

For this experiment, the following fruits were selected for the taste test. To keep it all consistent, I went with only the Trader Joe’s brand.

Freeze dried fruits selected for this experiment:

• Fuji Apples
• Strawberries
• Bananas
• Raspberries
• Blueberries

Each package will be open freshly to ensure that the tasting results can be most accurate. In between each fruit taste test, water is used to cleanse the palate.

Results

Here are brief descriptions of how each fruits tasted and smelled.

Fuji apples:

• Smell: none
• Flavor: skin tasted sweet while the inside white part tasted sour
• Texture: crunchy with a chewy flavor, similar to styrofoam

Strawberries:

• Smell: like fake super sweet strawberry powder
• Flavor: sour
• Texture: crunchy with a chewy flavor, similar to styrofoam

Bananas:

• Smell: very strong banana smell
• Flavor: plain (similar to unripe plantains) and a light sweet after taste
• Texture: super crunchy and a slimy texture after the bananas dissolved on the tongue

Raspberries:

• Smell: none
• Flavor: crunchy, sticky to teeth, sour
• Texture: chalky, no crunchy, full of hard seeds

Blueberries:

• Smell: none
• Flavor: taste like dirt, not sweet/sour
• Texture: super crunchy, hollow inside (all I tasted are the blueberries skin)

Overall, my top two favorites were the Fuji apples and strawberries. Raspberries and blueberries were my least favorites. The raspberries were too full of seeds. The seeds were hard and tough to chew on. The blueberries were flavorless with a bitterness dirt like aftertaste. The blueberries tasted just like unsweetened cocoa powder and super crunchy. The Bananas, ranked 3rd in this category, tasted very good; however, I am never a fan of bananas so there was a little bias here. I think the freeze dried banana tasted better than fresh bananas in my opinion.

As for the smell category, the bananas smelled the strongest and most similar to fresh bananas. The blueberries and raspberries had hardly any smell. Their packaging bags smelled like super sweet candy, but individually, these two fruits don’t have any smell.

The bananas tasted the most similar to what fresh bananas taste like. The flavor was all there except for the texture; however, the freeze dried bananas had a slimy aftertaste. Freeze dried blueberries and raspberries tasted nothing like that actual fruits. The blueberries tasted like bitter crunchy wrapper, and the raspberries tasted like a punch of mini flavorless hard seeds.

The bananas tasted the sweetness followed by the apples, strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries. Out of all the fruits, the bananas were actually the only ones that tasted sweet. All the other fruits tasted bland or sour.

Conclusion

In conclusion, my most favorite of all the four freeze dried fruits were the fuji apples. Both the raspberries and blueberries tasted so bad. Have you try freeze dried fruits? If so, which one/s is/are your favorite?