@Aloha what settings did you use for the aluminum keychains?
I have always hesitated to try these with my GF as I had heard that reflective material, especially metals, could damage the laser and a fiber laser was the correct tool for such things.
Clearly my concern was at least not 100% valid as it appears yours beautifully removed the anodized coating to produce an image. Truly came out great!
3 Likes
@evansd2, not to my knowledge have I experienced the joy of that treat. (How’s that for telling you I’ve never had it without telling you I’ve never had it? 
)
Both of you - I can understand the extra surface area creating more flavor. As for light-weight camping food @Aloha, wouldn’t dehydrated do the same thing? I use my dehydrator enough to justify it, especially when I dehydrate our garden veggies, especially garlic and onion. And I love making jerky.
I did see Walmart has a small freeze dryer for less than $70, and they specify it’s for candy and snacks. I may have to buy one and try it out!
3 Likes
That’s not a freeze dryer. They first freeze your food (the colder the better), then operate at a vacuum to sublimate the water, eventually raising the temps to finish the process. That doesn’t look like a pressure vessel nor does it appear to be insulated.
The pumps in true freeze dryers are hundreds of dollars by themselves. The price alone rules this out.
6 Likes
Thanks. I just used the MacBook setting. I’ve done many of these without personally having issues. I don’t know the prevalence of reflective laser head injury.
6 Likes
I’m afraid this is one of those “kernel of truth” issues. Copper reflects like 95% of the power of the laser, so a perfectly reflective piece of copper could damage your laser if it managed to reflect into exactly the right place. The reality is people even do copper successfully. No other metals have that issue, and anodised means it’s covered so definitely not reflective.
There are even 
settings for metals (MacBook and iPhone).
Where a fiber comes in is if you’re trying to cut metal. CO2s can’t do that at least at this power range. They can discolour, with help.
8 Likes
Yeah, I looked closer at it. Definitely not a freeze dryer. Marc keeps reminding me that I need to read everything on stuff, not just the title! Doesn’t look like I’ll ever be able to justify the cost of a freeze dryer. Darn it. They are supposed to retain the nutrients of food better than a dehydrator, so that’s a plus. Just way to far out of my affordability range. Hoping that in a few years they’ll come down in price, like big-screen tvs. 
5 Likes
Well today y’all cost me an arm and a leg. We had to go to Costco to get a few things (bacon mainly!) and right as we walked in the door, they had HarvestRight Home Freeze Dryer on the right-hand side as you walk in. Cost? $1,599.99, including “accessory pack” (which I don’t know all what’s in it.) I’m not even sure what size it is, but just googling it, the smallest HR brand was over $2,000. So I told my husband about it, we did some quick research on it, and got it. It’ll stay in the truck until tomorrow after we go buy something really sturdy to set it on. And we decided we’d leave it downstairs instead of hauling it upstairs to the kitchen (which I don’t have room for it up here anyway). I told him about the candies y’all have talked about, but we didn’t buy any candy. I’m really excited to use it for our garden produce instead of canning or dehydrating. Especially for tomatoes, as I want to turn them into powder instead of canning for use as sauce or paste.
So, for you who have them and have great tips on any good foods you can point me to, please do. I’m tagging this to go back and review the posts, as many of them were before my GF time. But I’m excited. And I blame all of you for leading me down this expensive path! But I’m excited about it. 
And please, don’t anyone take this post wrong. I’m not “blaming” in a hostile manner whatsoever. I am very appreciative of all I learn in this forum, whether or not it’s GF-related. I am totally excited about learning about freeze-dryers, and had it not been you folks, I never would have actually considered it.
9 Likes
Yay!!!
#rabbithole!
That is awesome. It’s a fun hobby.
I like this channel…
5 Likes
Oh and I got a cow print freeze dryer pillow so the door would not get as sweaty and lose the coolness. Somewhere on Amazon
5 Likes
Thanks! I’m looking forward to getting it all set up. I think the first thing I want to do is some frozen strawberries I have. We had to buy a chest freezer just to put all of our strawberries in that we bought last year (fresh from a strawberry farm - they are the best we’ve ever had!) and it is full. Can I just freeze-dry them from frozen, or do I have to thaw them first? Because they are really mushy thawed. I have them divided into 1 pound vacuum-sealed bags (frozen whole on trays before vacuum-sealing) and just use them to make one pint of quick strawberry jam at a time or over ice cream, because they just aren’t good to eat whole when they’re all mushy.
5 Likes
And I apologize for turning this thread into a food thread. If someone wants to move it or start a new food thread, that’s fine with me. I don’t know how.
6 Likes
Great question! It is worth experimenting.
I haven’t tried a whole frozen strawberry yet.
Though fresh sliced strawberry looks like it is fresh sliced when it is done and comes out amazing. Not like the freeze dried ones from cereals or target that look like they were pre-digested.
In my limited experience, I needed to run the freeze dry longer with whole fruits, blueberries didn’t work whole, needed to slice them.
Frozen mango chunks from Costco were too big. I think I ran them for 1.5 days and they still had moisture.
Since we all love going down rabbit holes here… maybe you could slice them with the greatest knife I have ever owned… it cuts through a raw potato like a pear…
Super sharp!
Shun Classic 6.5" Nakiri Knife,… Amazon.com
Just don’t use it to chop through bamboo skewers…. ::sigh:::
5 Likes
Well I did read that fruits, meats, etc., should be no thicker than 1/2", so I’ll have to cut my frozen strawberries anyway, since they are whole. We bought a Nikiri knife a while ago when I was chopping lots of onions, peppers, etc. It may not be the same one you have, but it is super sharp.
I haven’t even had time to do more than get the FD in the storeroom. I know I want to go ahead and order precut parchment sheets for it, but I haven’t even unpackaged the trays yet, or even looked closely at what I bought to know which size it is, much less hook it up! How’s that for buying on impulse? I have bought a loaf of cheap bread to do it’s “break-in run,” hopefully tomorrow!
4 Likes
Oh yeah the bread run, I forgot about that. there are so many great videos.
When we made our I Love Lucy video, I had cut some parchment paper to turn into the conveyer belt for the chocolate scene, and didn’t throw away the end bit, which turned out to work perfectly for the freeze dryer, but I also have some precut ones, and the ice trays
This is fun, I need to use ours more. 
I moved it to an inconvenient location when we had to replace the clothes dryer, and now I don’t play with it as much since I need to parkour over our possessions to get to it.
5 Likes
Well I forgot to “spray” the bread first, but oh well. It still worked. I now have some strawberries in there that I’d had in the freezer from last year when we bought a ton and a half of them. But since the FD suggests having them pre-frozen anyway, it worked great. I have ordered some more trays, and a bottle of vacuum oil to keep on hand as the little bottle that came with it was used just to fill it (halfway up the gauge, of course), but it took the whole bottle.
I did mess up, but learned a great lesson. If I need customer support, I will call Harvest Right and not use their chat. I couldn’t get the tray shelf in, so I went into chat, and I was told to remove the white corrugated plastic attached to the top and bottom of the shelf. Now mind you, the bottom is held on by four screws, and the top was securely glued on. But I was told I had to remove them. The bottom was easy. It took me an hour and almost a broken knuckle to get the top one off. And then to try to get the glue off! I had also asked about removing the black rubber gasket around the door to make it fit, and was told that I was not to do that. BOTH WERE WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! When Marc came in, I was almost in tears and he told me that the white things should be on there, and that yes, of course the black rubber comes off. That’s how he got the shelving unit out to begin with. Because I hadn’t seen him unpack it, I had no idea, and he was out working on the property when I was trying to set it up. We smashed the top piece back on and used my 3M tape on it, so it’s holding for now. I called support today and told them all that had happened, and ordered a new top piece. At least it didn’t cost much, but what a pain. I was hoping they’d just send me one for free since it was their chat line that told me all the wrong things to do. And I had even asked a couple times about both issues and was assured that the white pieces were just “packing material and need to be removed,” and the rubber was not to be removed at all. Ugh. But it’s working now and I’m excited to see how the strawberries turn out.
5 Likes
ugh, that is just bad automated service. Good luck with the first load! It is fun food.
3 Likes
The caramel m&ms work best. I also did the coldbrew caramel ones and those were good, too. But I think these are the only m&ms that work, because caramel works so well. (The chocolate part doesn’t change, so these would not be something you’d store long-term.)
8 Likes
@Aloha, yeah, I should have figured it was automated just because each of their posts ended the exact same way. Now I know. My first batch of strawberries is still drying (13+ hours and probably a few more hours to go). I think next time I’ll slice the strawberries thinner instead of just in half. I’m also researching on doing tomatoes for tomato powder, because I have a lot of jars left that I had canned (and have ruled those out for FD because they are pretty watery), and I only buy tomato paste, which I usually use half a can at a time and freeze the other half. And when we get tomatoes from our garden, I will FD those and turn them into powder.
I did have one other issue with the machine, and that was because we kept having trouble getting the door to seal properly, so the vacuum error message kept coming on. After fiddling around with the door, and it still not working, we followed a HarvestRight video and plugged the vacuum into the wall for testing. When it sealed properly, I plugged the vacuum back into the FD. But last night, I again got a vacuum error message. So I googled and found Live.Life.Simple.'s YouTube on vacuum issues. One of the first things he said was to make sure the vacuum plug was plugged into the machine. I knew it was, but lo and behold, I found I had forgotten to turn it back on. I fear this machine is going to be the death of me. I am so looking forward to figuring it all out and having everything run smoothly in the future.
@trually, I’m looking forward to trying the caramel M&Ms, as those are my favorite anyway. My husband doesn’t see the point of freeze drying candy. I told him that I understand that some people have made successful businesses out of freeze dried candy. (Which I’m NOT interested in doing.) But I’ll have to try a batch and see if I can’t change his mind. Also thinking of marshmallows. 
6 Likes
Oh my gosh, I can’t believe they did that! They should definitely have replaced that for free. I would have really pushed the matter! That is so messed up!
6 Likes
The marshmallows end up tasting just like the dried marshmallows you get in sugary cereals! It’s kinda funny. I did some of those lucky charms marshmallows (regular marshmallows they sell that are the shapes and flavors of lucky charms cereal) and they were totally the same except I think they were bigger.
6 Likes