So why freeze-dry cheese shreds?
- It’s portable and shelf-stable. You can carry cheese and not worry about it going bad, or going greasy and limp in the heat of summer if you are camping.
- It melts almost instantly. Just add it to your meals, and let it sit on the hot food, or stir it in, and by the time your food is cool enough to eat, it’s melted.
- It adds so much to recipes. Cheese hits the spot for me!
- It’s lightweight. Carrying 1 ounce of fresh cheese and the equivalent freeze-dried cheese saves a lot of weight. Less food weight = less weight for camping and backpacking.
While you can buy commercially made freeze-dried cheese relatively easy now, it is limited in the flavors – but also you don’t know what company made the cheese. (For example, on Amazon) Cheese is similar to meat for pricing, and will be the most expensive things you purchase commercially in cans.
I highly suggest visiting a restaurant/food service store for the best choice/prices with grated cheese. You can source large bags of already grated bags for a fraction of the cost at a grocery store. They also sell large blocks of cheese for grating at home. However…I’m not too fond of Costco’s mozzarella, which is sold with grated cheese and is near the yogurt. It just doesn’t melt well, I find and gets rubbery. We often shop at Chef’s Store (which used to be Cash n’ Carry) on the West Coast.
We do not pre-freeze our cheese shreds (we pre-freeze many items to speed up the process). They freeze fast using the machine and then head into the drying cycle. It took about a day’s worth of time, although most of it was hands-off (loading the machine, checking once or twice during the cycle, and then unloading and packing up were just a short time period). You will want to add a couple of extra hours to the cycle since you are freezing the cheese first.
Cheddar cheese on a tray, waiting to go into the machine.
Freeze-dried cheddar cheese.
You won’t find freeze-dried Swiss cheese commercially. It is sold in smaller bags than the more favored cheeses at restaurant supply stores. We find it in 2-pound bags, which will fill one tray on our large freezer dryer.
Just think….fondue in a power outage? Alternatively, Swiss cheese is often the lowest sodium cheese you can buy!
Freeze-dried mozzarella cheese.
How to store:
When the machine says it is done, take a test out. We look at the food visually, then give it the finger test – does it feel dry, and snappy. Then taste it.
We store most of our freeze-dried product in mylar bags. We use the Wallaby brand bags as they make ones rated for boiling water, and are pleated at the bottom. These they call the “MRE” bags.
We add in 1 pouch each of an oxygen absorber and a silica desiccant one.
Then we seal in an Avid Armor chamber sealer, which pulls all air out. Then we seal the top with the heat sealer that comes with the freeze-dryer unit. Mark the date you made it, and what’s in it and you are done! (As you can see, a chamber sealer pulls the air out, similar to how a Mountain House Pro Pak commercial meal looks like.)
Why do we shoot photos with mason jars but store most of our freeze-dried food in mylar bags? Well, these are my gold standard. Our chamber sealer can seal mason jars (a huge bonus for sure), so we put a portion of everything we freeze-dry into a mason jar and seal it. Then, we can watch the food to make sure it was properly dried. I often keep one on hand to use in recipe development as well. The mylar bags we use for more long-term storage and I prefer to not waste the bags. Mason jars are reusable, over and over, but I don’t keep all the food in them as we live in an earthquake country.
FTC Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links that give us commissions on products purchased. These items are what we used above.
~Sarah