Introduction
We left of our last post with us going off on some crazy adventure to redefine instant coffee. But it wasn’t quite as impulsive as it sounds. The fact is that we never would have invested in Freeze-drying if it wasn’t for the specialty grade instant coffee idea.
But…
We also would never have invested in Freeze-drying if we didn’t have a heap of other ideas about how to use the technique to create totally unique flavours, textures and experiences that would thrill our customers and keep them in the perpetual state of surprise that we have always gone for at Lynch’s. This post is about some of those other concepts that got us over the line with Freeze-Drying.
Some Culinary Techniques Just Can’t Work Together – Or Can They?
Sometimes you need to get the water out of something. When Chefs do this to concentrate the flavour in a liquid they call it “reducing”. There’s also other times you might need to reduce the water content for totally different reasons like when making Jams.
To get a Jam to set you need to get the temperature up to about 105°C, this is the point where the pectin in the fruit forms a gel with the acids and sugars. You want to do this nice and quickly because the longer you keep your fruit at high temperatures the more you will destroy the bright, lively, acidic fruit flavours that you want to lock into your jam.
Anyone who has made jam knows this is where it can fall down. Sometimes it can be really difficult to get the mix up to that setting temp. It comes up to just below 100°C just fine, but pushing it that extra few degrees to set-temperature can be difficult and if you spend too long doing it you get a disappointing jam that has lost a lot of the fruit’s character.
The reason for this is that fruit has a fairly high water content and the water is boiling off at the 100°C mark. Boiling is an endothermic reaction meaning that it absorbs heat. Even though you continue to heat the jam, the boiling off of the water is stealing your heat and until you get the water content down a bit, it can be hard to push the mix up to setting temp. This is the whole reason that some professional jam makers use vacuum cookers to reduce the water content faster at a much lower, gentler temperatures. Well explain how that works a bit better in our next blog.
What this all means is that if you want to get a bit creative with your jams and add some herbs or spices, the techniques available to you to do this are kind of limited to methods that don’t add too much water into the mix. So you can add leaf or grind but doing this can result in an unpleasant grain or cloudiness in the jam. Also, you are adding all of the ingredient including the bitter, unpleasant tannins and salts, rather than just the desirable elements that you purposefully capture in an extraction or infusion. For example, imagine you wanted to add a bold, smoky Russian Caravan Tea infusion to a lovely Blackberry Jam. Your only option to do that without adding liquid to the base is to add the tea leaf directly into your jam. That’s not something anybody would find pleasant.
A freeze-dryer completely changes this. We can create an infusion, properly extracting the tea in the above example for exactly the flavour profile that we want. Then we freeze dry the infusion. What we are left with is a powder and that powder is the total dissolved solids in our infusion. The nature of those flavours and aromatics is almost perfectly captured, we have just taken all the water away. Now we can add that to our jam. We can even add it when the jam is cooling back down if the aromatics are extremely delicate and we want to avoid the highest temperatures in the process all together. In this way we can create the wonderfully complex, layered condiments that you can find in our jams and preserves without introducing any extra liquid or unpleasant textures.
Same Idea – But Different
Another perfect example of how a Freeze Drying allows us to work with unique flavours is in gelato making. We produce all of our own gelato and sorbet onsite at Lynch’s Hub. We have a reputation for having a wide range of vegan flavours but there’s a bit of a secret to that. We don’t do that because we are trying to make vegan gelato, we do it because that is the best way we can make those particular flavours.
We’ve always been about thinking outside of the square and doing everything here onsite in the absolute best way we possibly can. We don’t make our Macadamia Gelato on macadamia milk because we want it to be vegan, we do it because why wouldn’t you? If you can figure out a way to get the texture and mouthfeel of that product just as good as any dairy based gelato (which we have), then making it on Macadamia milk can only ever enhance that flavour.
Another example is our Wattleseed gelato, we don’t make it on soy milk because we want it to be vegan. We make it on soy milk because after years of experimenting and refining that’s the best possible way we have found to make it. The earthy, beany flavours of soy compliment, complicate and fortify the subtle coffee, caramel, toffee notes of roasted Acacia Victorea wattleseed perfectly.
The difficult part of this is what is known in gelato making as “balancing”. In order to have the right texture, consistency and mouthfeel, gelato needs to have a certain structure of fats, sugars and proteins. That is a lot harder to get right when you are working with vegan bases. Until we started freeze-drying we sometimes just could not make it work for certain flavours, particularly ones that involved extractions or infusions. However with access to freeze-drying we can extract the dissolved solids from an infusion in the same way that we have already described and then add it to our gelato base.
It’s Not Just About New Ways to Work With Flavours
So far we have spoken a lot about how freeze-drying is a powerful tool for getting new flavours into the products that we already make. It’s more than that though, its a way to produce something totally different as well.
Freeze Dried Gelato isn’t just shelf stable gelato. Its kind of its own thing. It’s a completely different confectionary with a unique sensory experience that’s not just different to frozen deserts like gelato or sorbet but is completely different to anything else.
When you bite into freeze-dried gelato it pops and shatters and then there’s a burst of flavour accompanied by an instant melt as the product rapidly melts away in your mouth. A lot of flavours (particularly acidic fruity ones) are intensified by freeze drying.
Freeze drying turns pieces of fresh fruit into something you’d consider confectionary without adding any sugars, preservatives, additives or….well anything. If you have ever tried a freeze dried strawberry its like a crunchy little piece of intensely strawberry flavoured meringue or honeycomb. But unlike other means of preservation, freeze drying preserves all of the nutrients and goodness of that fresh piece of fruit. The only thing it takes away is the water.
Final Thoughts: It’s Not All Science — It’s Playfulness, Creativity, Craft and Intrigue
Freeze drying sits at the intersection of science and craftsmanship. You need precision, yes — but also intuition and imagination.
If you are like us and you get a kick out of something innovative and unique. If you believe that food should be vibrant and playful and above all, full of surprise. Then freeze drying is a powerful tool and the things we make with it are going to give you a real thrill.
Next Up – The Oldest Foods on Earth Reimagined
Before moving on to touch on the science behind what actually happens with freeze drying, we want to quickly outline how the technique underpins our ability to share the unique Australian Native Botanicals that are our true passion. For a range of reasons, these foods can be really hard to work with in a commercial sense and Freeze-Drying has been a game changer in this regard.