Freeze Dried Candy
Candy is a fun way to use your freeze dryer to prepare special gifts and unique snacks.
Equipment
- Freeze Dryer
- Silicone Mats I add these to each tray to prevent the sugar from hardening on the tray. I buy a roll at a time and cut to fit my trays. I've shared the link as well to make it easier to find.
Ingredients
- Candy Any flavor
Instructions
- Adjust your drying temperature on your freeze dryer to 145, this allows your sugar to heat and crystalize as it's vacuumed.
- Load your candy on trays. I find that most candy sticks to the trays and can also harden during the process. I like to use silicone mats to prevent them from sticking to my tray, this allows for easy clean up and packing once finished.
- One important thing to remember about candy is that it expands, and expands and then sometimes expands some more. Leave lots of room between pieces to allow them to grow or you may end up with one big glob.
- Place your loaded trays in the freeze dryer, close the door, and press start.
- That's it! Sit back and watch the magic, or don't because it's probably going to take a long time for anything to happen.
- Once your candy is done, you can unload your trays and package, don't touch any buttons at the end of the cycle. I use standard ziplock bags just to rapidly unload and reload the machine. I repackage later.
- Reload candy onto the trays, put them back in the freeze dryer and select the button "Add drying time". Select the up arrow until it reaches 6 hours. This method is known as piggy backing, this can be done at the end of any drying cycle, but most cycles have a much lower drying temperature so the sugar reaction will be different.At this step you can actually watch some candy change in form, marshmallows especially will begin to expand almost instantly.
- Remember when all done with the candy making to change your drying temperature back to 125.