In the few years that we have been making freeze-dryers for small businesses, I have noticed that those interested in different types of food come together in waves. A couple of years ago, we had about 10 people interested in freeze-drying honey in two months. Incidentally, this made me write an article on why not to put honey in the freeze-drier. Until the middle of last year, there was a wave of people interested in drying hemp, referred to as CBD.
Well, from then until today, there has been a wave of cheeses. I guess it's no wonder. At first, when a few curious people knew about freeze-drying food, everyone thought mostly of fruit and some vegetables. As more and more AMARUs have been released around the world, there have been interested parties from other industries interested in what their product would look like after freeze-drying.
It should be said straight away that cheese, probably any cheese, is very easy to freeze dry. It does not contain as much water as the previously mentioned fruit or vegetables, and it does not have to be a typical Swiss cheese to ensure porosity and therefore good removal of water from the product.
As a wave of interest in CBD drying, we introduced the 7-shelf system last year with the idea that it would offer users more shelf space and be able to dry different herbs in a larger volume than the standard 5-shelf version. What we didn't know was that it would also find its application in cheese, no matter if it was cheese from Holland or different variants of Slovak cheese.
It didn't take long for the first AMARU users to tell us that thanks to the 7-shelf system, they managed to get 14, and some even 15 kg of cheese into the machine in one load. Thanks to the spread over a larger area, the process did not take a week, but ranged from 28 to 38 hours depending on the type of cheese.
Moreover, the AMARU freeze-drier proved to be the perfect tool for drying cheese thanks to its gentle drying process. This is because industrially dried (and often imported) cheeses undergo a temperature increase at the end of the process that not only kills a significant part of the nutrients, but also deprives the cheese of its fat and thus its flavour. When buying, we therefore recommend that you look directly for a manufacturer/importer that has its own freeze-dryer.