Introduction
If you had a chance to look at our last post you would know that we had a lot of big ideas when we started Freeze-drying. We wanted to reinvent instant coffee and produce a convenience product for our customers that was unlike any other instant on the market. Something that was affordable, easy and still really great quality. However that wasn't the only thing we were cooking up, we've produced jams and preserves with complex, layered flavour profiles that can't be achieved any other way, as well as creative confections from freeze-dried gelato and sorbet which are unlike anything else you've tried.
One of the best things about having a freeze-drier though is the way it has changed how we can work with the foods that we are most passionate about. There are some real challenges to working with Native Australian Botanicals and being able to freeze-dry makes it a little more manageable.
The Oldest Ingredients On Earth Reimagined
As we outlined in our last blog post, freeze-drying gives us an ability to work with a much wider range of flavours and ingredients using a much wider range of methods and techniques. This plays right into our love for bush foods.
A great example is our Spiced Roasted Bunya Nut Gelato. Bunya Nut is an ancient food used by Australian First Nations people for thousands upon thousands of years. The Bunya Pines were part of the Australian landscape when there was megafauna roaming about the place. We roast our Bunya Nuts, and then grind them, and then extract them like a coffee along with spices like cardamon and cinnamon. The result is a wonderfully comforting warm flavour similar to roasted chestnuts. Then we freeze dry that extraction to create a shelf stable flavouring which we add to a vegan soy based gelato. This is the only way that we could get the flavour of that extraction into the gelato without ruining its texture and mouthfeel.
Given we have never seen or heard of Roasted Bunya Nut Gelato anywhere, we can’t imagine anything more thrilling or satisfying than the thought that we have potentially been able to use one of the oldest foods on the planet in a way that it has never been imagined before and in doing so have introduced it and shared it with people who have never even heard of Bunya Nuts before. That’s exactly the kind of think we are going for at Lynch’s.
Here's a little video of some of the staff playing with our Bunya Nut Gelato in affogatos when we first made it. You can tell how much fun they are having with it.
Completely Unique – With Just a Pinch of Familiar
On that subject of introducing foods to people that they have never considered or heard of, there are a few issues in working with the Australian native botanicals that we love here, which have tended to complicate our desire to share these foods with people.
We have found over the years that even though people are terribly interested in these flavours and native plants and love to talk and learn about them, getting your average punter to eat something they’ve never seen or heard of can be a hard sell. Many people have it in their heads that bush tucker is only good for survival purposes, like its going to be some Man-vs-Wild, Les Hiddens character grimacing as they try to smoosh a witchetty grub into their face. What was it that great Australian cultural export Crocodile Dundee had to say about our native flavours - “it tastes like s%$T but you can live on it”. Even without working against that image, people tend to go for the familiar.
BUT….We have discovered a hack. It turns out that showcasing these flavours in gelato, sorbet, jam or mixers seems to be a great way to wrap something totally unknown in just enough familiarity for people to try something new that they might otherwise not have considered. Our Davidson Plum Sorbet has transformed more than a few “interesting, but I’ll just have a scoop of strawberry” kind of people into “what other weird things have you got for me to try” converts.
The Rigours of Working with Native or Wild Foods – Ironing Out Lumpy Supply
Another difficulty in working with the ingredients that we love the most is the fact that many of these foods are wild harvested or are in early cultivation having largely not been developed and selectively bred over many years for easy farming and high yield. So fruiting seasons can be very short and can also be a bit hit and miss if the conditions aren’t right.
Riberry is a perfect example of this. Riberry is a wonderful ingredient. The tree is in the same family as cloves and cinnamon and these flavours come through in the fruit, so it has a wonderful spiced fruit flavour like spiced poached pears or apples. In addition the brilliant red colours are amazing. Here's a picture of a beautiful Riberry tree in fruit just near our café on Wharf Road in Newcastle.
We use Riberry to make gelato, shrubs and jams, leaning into the spiced elements by adding cinnamon and cardamon infusions using the freeze-drying techniques described here. When Riberry trees fruit they are prolific but the season is super short. In a few weeks the fruit will go from not yet ripe, to dropped and spoiled on the ground. So harvest has to be fast, intensive and timed to perfection. Further complicating things is the fact that often a whole season in an area will fail. The conditions aren’t right or we will get hail at the wrong time or any other factor comes into play and suddenly, you skip a season which means you don’t see a Riberry for two years.
If we were going to work with these products in a commercial sense, we needed to develop recipes and labelling and all kinds of other costly tasks that aren’t particularly sensible investments if you are working with a product that you could quite easily have no access to for years at a time. Freeze drying gives us the opportunity to preserve these ingredients in a shelf stable format during good seasons to make it much more viable for us to work with.
Can’t Make to Our Store – That’s OK, We Can Send Gelato in The Post
Freeze-drying doesn’t just allow us to work with more flavours and ingredients, it doesn’t just allow us to produce new products that aren’t like anything else out there. It lets us share our love for these foods with anybody, anywhere.
We love gelato. We love Bunya Nut. But until we could Freeze Dry, we could only share our completely unique Bunya Nut gelato with somebody that was standing in our store. Here's the thing, if you want to try it then we want to share it with you wherever you are. We want these amazing native Australian botanicals with their fascinating stories to be part of your rituals, celebrations and gifting no matter where you are in Australia. To us, that is the most exciting part of taking our retail pantry items into an online business.
Freeze-drying is made for this. The products that you can produce are lightweight, shelf-stable and perfectly portable. If Nasa can send it into space, then we can post it to you, easy-peasy.
Next Up – What Is Freeze Drying Anyhow
We've just about covered off all the reasons that we wanted to be able to freeze-dry at this point. There's a few of them, it took us three separate blog posts. What we can do with freeze drying and why we love it is almost as interesting and cool as the science behind what actually happens during the process. In our next blog we will give you a really easy to understand, Layman’s terms run down on what Freeze-Drying actually is and the science behind the craft.