How To Make Freeze Dried Candy Without A Freeze Dryer:
You can’t! ❤️
Until next time! Stay Fun!
Okay, so that’s the cheeky short answer. The longer truer answer is a little more complicated.
Why Freeze Dry Candy?
Freeze dried candy has become a super trendy treat over the last few years! I’m sure you’ve seen it on TikTok, at fairs and farmers markets, or even on our website!
Freeze drying candy intensifies the flavours and gives the candy a uniquely airy, crunchy texture! Not to mention it looks really cool!
Buuuut it’s really expensive to make… It can take up to 2 days from start to finish for a single batch of candy. Time is money, and that’s reflected in the price of this amazing candy. Not to mention the price of the machines! Home models range from $2,500 to $25,000!
With its popularity (and price tag), it’s no wonder people are turning to the internet for answers on how to recreate their favourite new candy at home!
I mean... how hard could it be? Right?
How Freeze Drying Candy Works:
First, room temperature candy (1) is frozen below water’s “triple point” (2). A vacuum then lowers the pressure in the chamber to around 0.05 psi (3) (for comparison, air at sea-level is 14.7 psi). Then the temperature of the food is raised above room temperature (4), and because of the low pressure, the ice sublimates directly into vapour, which condenses and freezes on the sides of the chamber, leaving the candy completely dry and crunchy!
You may be asking “What’s a triple point?” and “Subli-who?” Which are good questions to have! Let’s go over those sciencey terms before we continue.
Water’s triple point is the temperature at which it exists as a solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (vapour) simultaneously! It’s important to go below this point so that the water never becomes a liquid during the “thawing.”
Sublimating is when something goes from a solid straight to a gas, skipping the liquid phase altogether! Dry ice is a great example. Or when the ice cubes in the back of the freezer get smaller and smaller over weeks and weeks of just sitting there. It doesn’t melt, the solid literally disappears into thin air!
Debunking DIY Freeze Dried Candy Methods
Unfortunately, you can’t feasibly freeze dry candy at home without a freeze dryer.
I began the research for this blog honestly and earnestly believing that there would be some sort of hack to make proper freeze dried candy at home. After scouring the internet– looking at forums, TikTok, YouTube, and even company websites- most of what I found were F-tier fake videos and A.I. recipes cannibalizing each other with bad advice and nonsensical instructions.
Source: trust me, bro. I’m not going to link any specific bad recipes because I don’t want to drive traffic to bad content. If you’re desperate to see the bad recipes and videos for yourself, a little searching will bring you a dozen examples of what I’m talking about.
The content ranged from classic TikTok cutaway fakes, where the bag you saw in the freezer is filled with store-bought freeze dried candy off screen, and then “freshly cut open” to fake a successful hack; to A.I. generated recipes telling you to poke holes in a vacuum sealed bag of peach rings and toss it into a sealed cooler full of dry ice.
From “entertaining” fake videos to injury-causing instructions, the web is full of bad advice and disappointment for people just hoping to make their favourite treats at home. I hope that together we can bust some myths, and save you the time and heartache of a failed fake recipe attempt.
Now, because you’re smart, you can see there's a conflict of interest here because we sell freeze dried candy. But I pinky promise you that my motivations are to keep you safe and away from disappointing candy experiences!
Dry Ice Method:
Let’s start off with a bang! Literally!
I’m sure some of you have seen instructions online about making freeze dried candy with dry ice. This may sound plausible because dry ice gets anything it touches super duper cold, but it won’t work for a few simple reasons we’ll get to. More importantly, a lot of these recipes are straight up DANGEROUS!
Obviously, these A.I. generated recipes aren’t tested before they get released, but it looks like they don’t get read over either!
The recipes typically tell you to put 5 pounds of dry ice (that’s a block about the size of an 18-count egg carton) into your 60L (16 gallon) cooler. Then, you put a tray or a bag with 1 to 5 pounds of candy inside the cooler, seal it, and leave it for 24-48 hours to let the candy freeze and dry out.
Closing the cooler is one thing; the lid can open a little and burp the gas as needed, and if the area is well ventilated it just blows away safely. But too many of the recipes tell you to seal the cooler. As in tape it shut!
When that block of dry ice sublimates, it turns into about 1250L (330 gallons) of carbon dioxide gas. Maybe the people running these sites haven’t been on YouTube in the past 17 years, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what dry ice does when it's put in a sealed container.
IT EXPLODES!
It explodes is what it does.
Some of the recipes have a little blurb about safety, but most of them have pretty serious oversights ranging from sealing the cooler, to improper management of potentially dangerous CO2 gas, to depictions of handling dry ice with your bare hands!
Even if you ignore the glaring health and safety issues, these recipes just don’t work for practical reasons too.
The Practical Reasons:
As described above, freeze drying works by turning the water inside the food to ice, using a vacuum to drop the pressure, and then warming the food so the ice turns into vapour which condenses on the chamber walls – leaving the food dry and puffing it up.
To steel-man the recipes: the idea is that dry ice super-freezes the candy on a tray causing them to crack and expand as the ice crystals grow, and as the dry ice sublimates it pulls the water vapour away with it as it flows out of the box.
The dry ice dries the frozen candy.
You can see where the logic is.
But there are a couple big problems: No vacuum and not enough time.
For candies like Skittles, the vacuum and heat is the most important part of the process to get that crunchy bursting result (and honestly, it's the only part of the process that actually matters for them). Heat softens the candy, and when the pressure drops, the tiny air bubbles inside Skittles expand causing the candy to crack open and puff up. If the vacuum is maintained, the little bit of moisture inside is drawn out, drying the puffed candy. In other words, it’s not the freezing that dries Skittles– it’s the vacuum.
Softer candy like gummy bears do need the freezing part, however, because there’s more moisture in the candy that needs to be sublimated out. Skittles basically air dry in a vacuum, gummies don’t.
Under the ideal conditions of the freeze dryer, sublimation takes anywhere from 12-24 hours. Natural sublimation takes weeks! Think of the ice cubes in your freezer and the way they naturally shrink in the tray if they don’t get used for a while. Now imagine how long it would take for them to disappear entirely!
Dry ice will speed up this process, but from weeks to week; not weeks to day. Plus, you’d need to refill the dry ice, which is expensive, and there’s a ton of other variables you need to account for, not to mention safety and ventilation. It’d be a whole thing and honestly they’d probably come out gross.
Now, if you want to get pedantic and argue against my cute anti-clickbait opener, you could pull it off. I believe in you! But there’s no world where dry ice is a good or viable option for making your own big bag of freeze dried Skittles. (And besides, a better argument would be that you can make Vacuum Skittles at home without a freeze drier, which are basically the same thing. But we both know you don’t own a vacuum chamber and heating pad, so that doesn’t count!)
Normal Freezer Method:
Like we talked about earlier, frozen foods will naturally sublimate when they just sit around in your freezer. Have you ever pulled out a bag of chicken strips that’s been in there for a while and seen a bunch of ice crystals in the bag? That’s what we’re talking about here! Some of the water in the chicken sublimates out and gets trapped in the bag where it turns back into ice.
Some recipes say to toss your candy in a freezer bag, put it in the freezer for a month, and BAM! Freeze dried candy!
Small problem: where does the moisture go? Have you ever thawed a bag of frozen berries? Do those look freeze dried to you?
Other recipes have the foresight to put the candy on a tray, which is technically better. We have a plate of candy that’s been in the office freezer for weeks. Do you know what’s on that plate? Freezer burnt candy.
Which, actually, is exactly what freeze drying is!
The same way fermenting, brewing, cheese-ing, curing, and dry-aging foods are basically just controlled rotting, freeze drying is just controlled freezer burn! And just like those other methods of preserving food, there’s a right way to do it, a wrong way, and a VERY wrong way! The “normal freezer” method is a wrong way. Not dangerous, just wrong.
This method is harmless, so give it a shot if you really want, but you’re going to be disappointed with the results, so please trust me and skip this method too.
Freezer and Tumble Dryer Method:
Final exam! Time to test your knowledge!
A man on TikTok tells you he’s found a hack to make perfect freeze dried Skittles at home! He puts a family-size bag of Skittles in the freezer for 6 hours, then puts it in a running tumble dryer for 20 minutes. He then cuts the unopened bag open and pours out puffy crunchy freeze dried Skittles!
In the comments, please list three reasons this “hack” would not work!
Thank you! Your comments will be graded by next week.
The video is fake, and it’s not even a good fake. I know this, and because you’re smart and read this far down, you know this too.
At time of writing, there’s no indication that it’s a bit or a joke. Obviously it’s absurd and ridiculous, but the creator doesn’t mention that it’s fake, or that it won’t work, or any "it's just entertainment" disclaimer. Which isn't a crime, but it's definitely yucky. Especially when the majority of the views and comments are from children!
Luckily, this one is harmless and (probably) won’t ruin your dryer if you try this at home. It’ll just disappoint you, and you’ll feel like you didn't follow the recipe correctly. This, and so many other “hack” videos are fakes, which can lead to disaster for people who follow them believing in the integrity of the posters. Always do some research and read/watch a trusted source before recreating any hacks you see on YouTube or TikTok.
Conclusion:
If you’ve got a craving for freeze dried candy, the $3,000 you could spend on a freeze drying machine will get you VERY far on our website!
We have everything from Freeze Dried Ice Cream and Matcha-Covered Strawberries to Skittles and Jolly Ranchers! Come see our huge variety of freeze dried classics and new exciting candy from all over the world!
I hope that you’ve found this blog helpful and informative! I’m happy to have helped you learn about this exciting new genre of customized candy! If anyone asks about freeze dried candy, or if they're contemplating making it on their own with a hack they saw on TikTok, you can show off your knowledge and steer them in the right direction!
Thanks for reading! If you have a favourite freeze dried candy, we’d love to hear about it in the comments! Let us know if we have something you love, or what we need to get to complete our collection of selections!
Until next time! Stay fun!
