Creative and healthy snacks made easy with freeze-dried fruits. Because many snacks contain too much sugar and unwanted additives. But there are healthy alternatives with natural ingredients and vitamins.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an adult or a child: small snacks are a convenient way to fill up your body’s energy reserves so that you can master the challenges of the day with full concentration. Unfortunately, most of the goods on offer contain a lot of sugar and many harmful additives. Luckily, some companies have made it their mission to offer healthy alternatives. Freeze-dried fruit is a good example of how there is another way.
Importance of optics
Perhaps you have already wondered what options there are for providing yourself and your family with healthy snacks. We felt the same way recently. But the search for suitable alternatives to the usual chocolate bars and candy bombs proved difficult. Researching healthy products for children, in particular, turned out to be nerve-wracking.
The problem with youngsters is that snacks not only have to be convincing when looking at the ingredients but also when the packaging is opened. If little treats don’t look delicious, the explanation for the sense and purpose of the new snack can be logical: children won’t eat it! The appearance of the products is elementary and crucial for them to be ready to be tasted. Many supermarket visits later, we finally found what we were looking for on the internet. Recently, we have become lovers of freeze-dried fruit snacks.
Freeze Dried Fruit Facts
In order to produce freeze-dried fruit, ripe fruit such as strawberries or raspberries is frozen in the first step. This usually requires temperatures between -15 and -78 °C. In the second step, the fruit is placed in a vacuum chamber. Due to the vacuum, the already frozen water contained in the fruit dissolves into thin air. The ice changes into the gaseous state in the vacuum chamber. This physical process is called sublimation in technical jargon. The fruits are thus sublimated.
Because some fruits contain 90 percent water, freeze-drying drastically reduces their weight. The most striking advantage of this process is that almost all of the water is removed from the fruit. The vital substances contained, such as vitamins, remain almost 100% in the fruit and are not lost, as is the case with many other manufacturing processes. The same applies to minerals, trace elements, roughage, and secondary plant substances. Even the aromas, taste, and color of the natural fruit are preserved during sublimation. If they are sublimated in their original form, even this is preserved quite well.
Freeze-dried fruits are healthy
Compared to traditional dried fruit, freeze-dried alternatives are healthier. The reason: In order to produce dried fruit, the fruit must be heated to around 40 to 70 °C. Many vitamins and secondary plant substances do not survive this because they are extremely sensitive to heat.
Freeze-dried products are used in a variety of ways in the food industry. The fruits are found, for example, in fruit bars or as crunchy’s in mueslis. For nibbling between meals, we find them as slices or whole fruits. They’re fast in the mouth. But muesli bars are also a sensible way of preparing them. The little treats can serve as a little boost of energy for the youngsters at school during breaks or give adults new strength at work.
Since we discovered it, we have been using freeze-dried fruit to make our own healthy muesli, desserts, fine smoothies, and delicious yogurt. The children also get the small vitamin suppliers to take to school. This is where the advantages become even clearer: since the freeze-dried fruit hardly weighs anything, the child’s back is relieved and you no longer have to worry about how the fruit will get to school without being damaged. Up until now, fresh bananas or grapes, in particular, had to be packed very carefully. Freeze-dried snacks do not spoil. And even if the snacks are forgotten, nothing happens. Since it contains no water, there is no risk of mold.
