Debunking: Japanese chocolate infused strawberries, freeze drying...

To see how freeze dryers work watch the video above.

How to make chocolate infused strawberries in the Harvest Right Freeze dryer (affiliates link). I approached Harvest Right and they provided the freeze dryer for this video. If you’re wanting to get one remember that freeze dryers are very heavy, I bought a trolley from the hardware store so that I could move it as needed and store supplies in the drawers. It is easy to use, my favourite thing to make, apart from candy for friends, is freeze dried fruit – I leave it in jars on the bench and it all gets eaten.

To make chocolate infused strawberries.
1. Wash fresh ripe strawberries and remove hulls. You may like to experiment with different breeds of strawberry.
2. Freeze dry and at the end of the cycle choose extra dry time to make sure they are really, really dry. Store in mylar bag and use for the next step ASAP.
3. remove the shelves from the freeze dryer as you would for cleaning.
4. Melt some chocolate (look for one that only contain cocoa butter, no vegetable fat on the ingredients). Add some additional cocoa butter to thin it down. 300g (10.58 ounces) milk chocolate + 150g (5.29 ounces) cocoa butter.
5. Place strawberries in a container and cover with chocolate. They will float because they are full of air. Find a way to push them down and still allow bubbles to escape. I used the mesh from a steamer, pushed down by a circle cutter, weighed down with a bowl. If you’re doing this regularly I’m sure you can find a better way to do this.
6. This is what worked for the first successful test with one strawberry:
On the freeze dryer close the valve.
Press the HR logo to get to the testing screen. Turn on the vacuum only (no heat of freeze).
Pull a vacuum for 16 minutes (mT <500), then turn the vacuum off but do not open the valve. Wait 5 minutes. Turn the vacuum on again for 5 minutes (mT <500). Turn the vacuum off but do not open the valve, wait 10 minutes (mT ~14kmT). Then slowly open the valve until you hear a slow but obvious gas sound until pressure back to normal. For the bigger batch I used a similar process but the pressure did not go as low as with one strawberry.
Initial vacuum 20 minutes mT=914
5 minutes off but don’t open valve (mT went to 12K)
Turn on vacuum again for 5 minutes.
Turn off vacuum but don’t open valve for 10 minutes.
Open valve to slow gas leak sound until pressure normalizes.
Tip onto a cooling rack with a baking tray underneath and shake rack to drain excess chocolate off.