Okay, I think today is the day
that the future arrives. Here, take a look. Ooooh! Hello, my friends. What do we have here? Okay. It's here. The Harvest Right Freeze Dryer which, I don't know about you, but I never thought I'd own
a freeze dryer in my life. I do remember going to the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center as a kid and like
eating the freeze dried ice cream. So the reason that I got turned on
to this actually is from John Kohler, from Growing Your Greens. He
came over to my house once, toured my garden and then he gave me
some of his freeze dried strawberries. And he was like, oh,
dehydrating is so old school. Everyone's freeze drying these
days. And I was like, wow, how much does the freeze dryer
cost? And he was like, two grand. And it was like four years ago. I was
like, uh, I don't think that's for me, John, but I'll take the strawberries.
And then Harvest Right reached out to me. And I moved into the Homestead and I
started thinking maybe it actually makes more sense than I thought it did. Just because of how well it
tends to preserve the food. But I don't know as much
about it as I would like. So let's first start out by just
unboxing it and seeing what's inside. There's a lot of gear here. So the first thing we
have is an oil filter. One oil filter. Next, we have an impulse sealer.
Don't know what that is yet. So we're going to learn together.
Next up we have the owner's manual. We have a firmware troubleshooting guide. We have oxygen absorbers, like
this is some high tech stuff. We have the high vacuum pump
oil. Guide to freeze drying. I'm assuming this is the pump,
at least the tubing for the pump. Then we have Mylar bags
for storing your stuff. These are the trays. Oh these are
heavy, even a single one of these trays, that's heavy duty. I wonder what
kind of metal it's made out of - maybe aluminum, but it kind
of feels more heavy than that. Okay. And then here we actually
have the vacuum pump. So let's put this down and
get on to the next box. Okay. So here it is. Wow! It looks like a laundry machine. Oh, that's a thing of beauty right there.
That is a thing of beauty. Okay. We need to figure out how
to put this thing together. So I moved it inside for now. I think this is a good place
for it right in the kitchen. I'll probably end up moving it the pantry, but now I need to figure out how to
actually put this whole thing together. So bear with me, I sometimes am
not the best with instructions. So let's see if we can figure this out.
At least I know these are the trays. We've got to get into
the vacuum pump here. I gotta say, this thing
came extremely well-packed. I would imagine that it'd be a bummer if
you got this thing and it was damaged. But this thing is, I mean look at the
packaging on this thing. Triple wall, quadruple wall cardboard. I'll get all
the stuff off of it. So this is the pump, but this is a premier oil
pump, I believe. Let's see. So it says, check the rubber gasket on the
door to make sure that it is clean. That would be this right
here. It looks clean to me. Make sure the inside of the
acrylic is clean. Looks clean. That's step number one. Put oil in your vacuum pump
by removing the red cap. If you have one of our bright green
premier oil pumps, that's true, you need to unscrew the black oil
demister on top of the pump. Okay. Fill your vacuum pump to the center
of the sight glass and replace the cap. Okay, so this is the demister. I'm guessing I fill it to
the center right there. And I'm guessing this is the oil.
Alright, in we go with the oil. We're going to the 50%
mark on the sight line. See if I can get a good pour here.
Ooh. Okay. Okay. There it goes. Okay. That's about halfway right there. Yup. Cool. On with our cap. Okay, next step. Next step we have to remove this little
cover here and we're going to start connecting the hose. So I've got this hose right
here and I'm just going to screw it in hand tight, I believe. Man, the componentry is really solid
feeling. Hand tight, there we go. So that's in. Next up, we remove the other side and connect that. So now the pump is connected to
the actual freeze dryer unit. Hand tight again. There we go. So the vacuum pump needs to be powered up. And so does the freeze dryer. So both
are getting plugged in right now. So I'm plugged in. This is the
way that the tray sits in there, the shelving unit. So there's these
heating elements on the bottom. Those have to stay on the bottom and
then there's this rubber gasket here. And then the way that the
door works is it comes in, it latches and then it seals. So you can kind of see,
actually you can see it right here. This little outline, it means
it's pressing up against it. So it could probably press a little
more, yeah, on the top there. But we'll see how that works. Actually
there we go. I got the whole thing to go. I just pulled the gasket out
slightly to create the seal. The next thing to do on the outside here
is to take the drain valve and close it. Just like that. Now we are
going to turn on the vacuum pump. Okay. There we go. I just turned on the
Harvest Right as well. We're going to go through
a couple of tests here. The testing phase seems like
it went well. I've renamed it, the Epic Freeze Dry. And now we can actually
drain this drain valve. Hopefully I do it the right
way. Let's see what happens. I've run all of the test
diagnostics, it's going well. What I need to do now is
take some soggy bread, put it on these trays. And we are going to run a burn-in
batch to kind of get rid of any sort of manufactured smell, whatever is going on in the Harvest
Right when it's fresh out of the box. So let's freeze dry some
soggy bread. In we pop. We have to do some fresh harvesting. I've got some stuff in the kitchen
right now, but I'm going to take, I believe this is the 'delicious hunt',
and we'll try to freeze dry this one. But I want to see if I have
some strawberries too. These strawberries have been really productive. Come take a look actually at
just how vigorous they are. What we've done is we took off all those
flowers and that really, really helped. So you're seeing big chunky boys
like this come out literally almost every single day. I'm getting 5,
6, 7 of these. If I wait two days, I have like 15. So enough for like
a morning serving of strawberries. So I'll hunt around here for a second
and see what I can find. Whoa, this! Look at this, dude. There's tons. Yeah. I did not notice these earlier.
Wow! It's like 10. Just right here. We have a lot of strawberries, but there's also a lot more because
Jacques had some stuff that he had in his garden that he wanted to see how
the freeze drying process worked. But just look at this, I mean, I
picked this patch two days ago. I had this many strawberries still
come out. So needless to say, I would eat these but I still
want to see how they freeze dry. But I've got this, I've got a tomato, we've got a couple of cucumbers from my
garden. There are some tomatillos here. Maybe we'll do those. Maybe we won't. But why don't you walk through kind of
what you got, Jacques. So I just brought. Two carrots from the garden, a couple of
peppers. These are some chioggia beets, I think I got a couple of those. Oh, the concentric circle
striped ones? Yeah. And a couple like little zucchinis cause
I was curious to see how that works. Ancho. Poblano and a zephyr zucchini. So yeah, at this point it's basically just
let's break this down into semi-uniform pieces. It's probably not the best idea to do a
full strawberry because what's happening is sublimation. So you cool the
fruit or the vegetable or the food. And then you create a vacuum
and when you warm it back up, water can't exist in a
liquid form in a vacuum. And so it just dissipates to gas and
that's why you get the same structure. And you really want to make that
process easy. So for example, on this strawberry right here,
I would just come through, maybe do a little heart-shaped
cut out of the top here. So that's gone. And then I would probably end up just
cutting it into slices like this, just to make it really,
really nice and easy. And you've got to think
about once it's freeze dried, that's going to be the
form you're eating it in. So whatever form factor you want to
enjoy it in, like these little slices, that's probably a good idea. You know, you could do it a different way if
you wanted to. You could do it very, very fine and then like grind it up
into a powder and add it to oatmeal or something like that. That
could be a good idea. But yeah, at this point we're just going to process
and maybe I'll let you stack these over here for now and we'll
we'll trade off. Yeah. Some of the other cool things I
saw was like you could do eggs, you could do full meals. And then like basically make the
entire camping meal, freeze dry it, bring it camping and it's just like
those little pouches. Like an MRE. It fits whatever you want in
there. So that's really cool. Yeah, the thing that's interesting about it
is you can freeze dry I would say almost anything, like a stick of butter
is going to be very difficult. Anything heavily oily is going to
be difficult. But besides that, like these strawberries are
going to be absolutely perfect. I guess if you think about like Lucky
Charms, when you get that cereal, the fruit and the marshmallows in that
are dehydrated, uh, or freeze dried. Excuse me. Anytime I say
dehydrated in this video guys, it's just a complete brain fart.
So please excuse me on that. We are talking about a freeze
dryer in this video. But yeah, it's a really fun method. And I'm really curious to see cause what
we're putting in kind of a smorgasbord of different things here.
You can put in cooked stuff. So if Jacques wanted he could roast
the beets and then freeze dry them, if he wanted to. Because you know, rehydrating them uncooked
is much different of course, than rehydrating them cooked. So these have been really good,
definitely been stealing a few, you know, just walking by the bed. It's news to me. Honestly, that's news to me guys and that's
actually going to be a serious thing that we're going to have to talk about. So I probably would have had
like maybe 80 right now, but ... Okay yeah, we don't pay Jacques actually. He just has to forage from the garden. No, people are going to think we're
serious about all of this. People think we're serious when we joke
around. He's a paid person on the team. Don't worry about that. That's why
my acting is so good. Yeah. Yeah, I actually had to pay for him to go to
Screen Actors Guild and we actually, it was really sort of annoying cause
it cost a little more than average. Because they were like, oh man, he's
really green. Like he needs a lot of work. So we put him through like a two month
program with the Screen Actors Guild. It was rough. Yeah, he actually called
me a couple of times. Like, he's like, I don't know if I can do
this. I can't hack it. Yeah. The moment is here. We actually
get to put it in the freeze dryer. So the real important parts to
note here are the vacuum pump. You have to have oil in it. The pressure has to be open and
then you also have to have it on. I'm not turning it on just quite yet
because it's quite loud and it would mess up the audio. But the other thing that's
very important. You see this seal here? This seal has to actually seal
to create a vacuum, right? So when you close this, what you will want to see is a
little line that indicates that there's some pressure being applied
from this acrylic, onto that. And then you really
just want to fill it up. It does most of the rest of it on its own. So let's get our strawberries
in at the bottom here, there's enough space for four.
So in goes the strawberries. In go the tomatoes. Jacques' peppers and his zucchini. And then his root crop section
of his beets and his carrots. In they go, we'll close it up and
I'll show you how to set it up. All we need to do is click Start. Select Not Frozen because these are
not frozen vegetables, they're fresh. You have to make sure you close that
drain valve and turn on your oil pump. Hit Continue and the process begins. So
we'll see you back in quite a few hours. We're out here hanging in the garden.
Jacques went to put his straw hat on. He's got to look the part. So
what do you want to start with? Do you want to start with
your stuff or my stuff? Um. I dunno, should we save the
strawberries? You know, a little. Sweet. A little best for last? Little
dessert at the end. So what we did, because you've taken a hundred
percent of the water out, the air has water in it in
the form of a humidity level. So I've already put these in Snapware
with a little silica packet to suck out any oxygen. But for a little
bit, we can pop these open. So coming up first is
the pepper medley, right? So three different peppers, right?
Yes, we have the yellow one, we have the ancho. I'm going
to try the ancho. What. Are you gonna try? I think I'm gonna,
I want to try all of them. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to go with
the ancho. It's the Jimmy Nardello. You know what's weird is like the second
you eat it you feel like nothing's happening. And as water gets
back into it, the flavor just. Pops out. It's like a really, it's like eating the whole
pepper in like one bite. The concentration level of the flavor is
insane. That's what I've noticed. Okay, I'm going to try. Can you get that
audio? Crunch, crunching. Oh yeah, yeah. Here. It's very, yeah. Okay. So I'm going to try this
one. This is the Nardello. The orange was the tequila sunrise
or sorry no, it was the bell. It was orange sun, orange sun bell. Honestly, it's not even that bad. It doesn't taste like a standard freeze
dried thing because normally those are a little bit more sort of crunchy, I guess. Something about the texture of the
pepper, especially the skin I guess, just doesn't do that, but. I
really like it. I really like that. What would you use it in? I'm trying to think just now cause it's
going to get rehydrated pretty quick. I. Would almost just like
pop it into, like as. Is. Or you could just powder it
like a really delicious pepper powder. Yeah, and then you could add it in. Okay, so now we've got Jacques'
chioggia beets and his carrot. So I'm going to go in on a beet first.
Look at that. I want to try the zucchini. The color kind of bleeds a little
bit too. Yeah. Interesting. You're going with zucchini? Yeah. Okay. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. No, I think that was a
grower's mistake though. I think the beet would have been good, but I think it was more
of a grower's thing. Well, how was the zucchini? It tastes
like it's great zucchini. But it's. Raw because you did both these
raw for some reason. Yeah. Okay, I'm having AN experience, I'll say that.
Maybe the carrot's going to be better. Let's see. What did you think? Tastes like
a raw beet. The beet tastes like. It tastes like a raw beet that actually
wasn't perfectly ripened, I guess. And that's why I was saying
grower's error. Yeah. I mean, maybe. Okay. Carrot. Do you
know what type this was? Actually, I think this is a Chantanay carrot. Okay. So French style. Yeah. Ooh,
there's a good crunch on that though. It's like, man, it's like
drinking like carrot juice. Wow! But you could chew it. That's really interesting. This
is my favorite so far, the carrot, out of all these two right here. You
know where it came from, so. Ha ha ha. Well, you know, even a broken clock
is right twice a day. Okay, so this is the tomato, the
delicious tomato. I'm actually
most excited for this. I'm excited. Okay, so here's,
what's crazy about this. Because this was a fresh tomato, which I think you normally probably
wouldn't freeze dry a fresh tomato, but we just wanted to test it.
I'm in the exploratory phase. I want to figure out like what works
and what doesn't. But first of all, look at this, just look at this. You know what I mean? It's it's
like give it, yeah, yeah. A little, and you can see that poof. Yeah. The inside is like. What does
it look like? Entirely like open, like totally dried out. Yeah. It's
like it didn't lose any volume. Yeah. But it just lost all the moisture. It's. Crazy how that works too.
With the sublimation, you would think it would deform it
somehow, but it doesn't seem to. It's definitely a different color, but
that's just because the water isn't. Right. Oh, you know what would
help? I bet, you know what? I bet I can make the color come
back. Watch this. Little science. And it's brighter already. Wow. Whoa. It's brighter. Okay.
Hold on. That's crazy. That's a flavor pop. Yeah. Pops
really hard. It's like really. Wow. Intensely delicious
tomato. And it also comes, cause we tried this when we were
cutting it up. It comes right back. Yeah. A hundred percent.
Whoa. This tastes like. Like literally a perfectly
fresh heirloom tomato. It tastes garden fresh, is the
thing. It tastes garden fresh. Next time, we'll do like a little
basil on there maybe. You know what? Someone told me, maybe it
was one of you watching, they said put a little basil
and salt and whatever on it. And they said pizza bites, pizza bites. I can do it with a big fat one.
Oooh! That's really good. Okay. That's a top one right there. This is
not ranking above the carrot for me, but I have a feeling this little
boy here is going to do well. So this one is the one I'm most
familiar with eating freeze dried. Cause I did have them, I think,
as a kid. Yeah. For sure. I mean, these are very lightweight again,
they're very crispy. Like you can, you know, so let's go ahead and
go in. And these were fresh. Dude, that's a crazy flavor explosion! Yeah, so what I'll say
for everything here, it's like each slice is the
equivalent of eating the whole thing. Yeah. So much flavor. Yeah, that's what
it tastes like. Yeah. And it's like. Wow. Maybe some like super taster could
tell us what's actually happening. But something about it is like,
not only does it taste like, cause if you ate a whole strawberry it
wouldn't taste like this. Yeah. It tastes like it got compressed into
less flavor molecules or something. I don't know what I'm. Talking about. Just cause it's not
diluted till it hits your tongue. It's just like all you could
taste is the rehydrating. True, cause there's no water. Yeah. And it still has, definitely still
has some of the strawberry aroma. Hmm. This one would probably be super good
to just put in oatmeal in the morning or like cereal or something. A. Little bit of ice cream. A little bit ice
cream. Oops. I know what you could do. I'm going to just keep going
till he tells me to stop. And he should have
stopped a long time ago. He should have stopped a long time ago
because this is my produce here. Uh. And you know, I. Think we're going to have to
bill you for that. Anyways, you could then toss this into like a
spice grinder and you'd have a strawberry powder. And you could then use that
powder in pretty much anything you wanted. So we're going to keep on
snacking, or at least I am. Cause Jacques is at his employee limit. And we hope you enjoyed this
unboxing and sort of first look, I guess, at the
Harvest Right Freeze Dryer. I don't know what to say
about that. But you know, if you've had an experience with it, definitely let us know what we should
try next or what I should try next. And if you want to check
out the Harvest Right, there'll be a link in the
description. But until next time, good luck in the garden, keep
growing and keep on freeze drying. You're not getting, ha ha ha. He's
like a little toddler, I swear.
