An Introduction
Meet Drooler. This is our Freeze Dryer. She came to us by means of one of my ADHD weak moments; where I thought this expensive machine would turn into some business for the kids and I to enjoy. After all, it was my son, then 10, who had stumbled upon a Freeze-Dried candy vendor at an open-air market at a marina we were visiting in the summer of 2022 that introduced us to it all in the first place. At the height of the Freeze-Dried frenzy, we found ourselves running the numbers and thought it would be so fun to sell candy. So, I bought the machine about a year later only to find out that the Wisconsin Homestead Laws are prohibitive to anything less than a certified commercial kitchen.
Thankfully, it was not lost on me that the machine had a backup use. We could make shelf stable foods and we had a need for that. Ciara is not set up for the long-term living we have done on her. Our refrigeration has always been quite minimal and has been a source of creative solutions for the entirety of our sailing lives. For the summers up to that point we only had up to three weeks max at a time to spend aboard with our family. In the summer of 2024, we would be opening that time frame to eight straight weeks, and then up to 12 weeks the following year. We barely managed our cooling needs those years. We also noticed that grocery stores are few and far between where we end up dropping our anchors.
Freeze Drying is not quite a plug and play machine. It took me another year after purchasing Drooler for the confidence to kick in to really give food preparation a try. Thank goodness Captain can wake up one day and decide to do something out of thin air, because that is how we finally got going. We just starting making large batches of things we wanted to try and figured out the science of the machine settings and wished. There have been some fails. Finding out which foods Freeze-Dry and rehydrate well has been trial and error. So far, knock on wood, I have not had any major issues or food explosions and our success rate is much higher than the fails.
I am here to share more about Drooler and all her she gives to us on the water. Thanks for being here and if you meet us in the wild, don’t be shy to see if we have some treats to try!
