What is freeze-dried candy? Two kinds, one of them fruit

What is freeze-dried candy? Candy that has had its water taken out while frozen. The piece is frozen solid, the air pressure around it drops until ice cannot melt, and the water leaves as vapor, so what is left is dry, light and crisp. The name covers two things that share a chamber and nothing else. One is candy from the candy aisle, put through the process. The other is fruit, which the process turns into candy. A bag of sour freeze-dried strawberries lists nine ingredients, and the first one is a strawberry. Both kinds crunch. The ingredient list is how you tell them apart.

The first kind: candy-aisle candy, freeze-dried

Gummies, taffy and chewy candies go into the chamber as they are. A gummy holds a little water, and under vacuum that water expands into vapor on its way out, so the piece puffs to several times its old size and sets as a brittle shell, hollow in the middle. That is all that changes. The ingredient list comes out the way it went in: syrup, gelatin, the named dye, in the same order. If the candy was sour, the sour was sanded on, and some of the sand stays on the tray, so a freeze-dried sour gummy is usually a little less sour than the gummy it started as. What it gains is the crunch, and the crunch is the reason people buy it.

The second kind: fruit, freeze-dried until it is candy

Put a strawberry in the same chamber and something different happens, because a strawberry is mostly water, about 91 percent of it. Frozen, the water leaves as vapor. The sugar, the acid, the color and the shape stay, at about a tenth of the weight, with a structure that is open all the way through where the water used to be. Leave it there and that is freeze-dried fruit, sold plain. Add the sour, sugar and food acid, citric and malic, Infuz'd through the piece, not just sanded onto the outside, and it is candy. The sour goes all the way through. The coat on the outside is the encore. The fruit arrived with acid of its own, so it was partway to sour before anything was added.

How freeze-dried candy is made

Both kinds are made the same way. The piece is frozen solid, to around -40 degrees. It goes into a chamber and the air is pumped out until the pressure is too low for ice to melt. The ice turns to vapor instead, straight from solid, and leaves. The trays are warmed a little so it keeps leaving, and a cycle runs 20 to 40 hours. For the candy-aisle kind, that is the entire story. For the fruit kind there is one more step, the sour, and the how stays in the house. If you want the three ways of taking water out of fruit side by side, with the temperature, hours and water left for each, we laid them out in one table.

Why both crunch, and nothing else matches

Crunch is the signature of the process, and both kinds have it, because in both the water left as vapor from a frozen structure and what remains is dry, open and shatters. After the first bite they part ways. A freeze-dried gummy is a shell of syrup and gelatin: it cracks, turns sticky and is gone, and it tastes like the gummy did, minus some of its sour. A freeze-dried strawberry cracks and then melts back into fruit a second later, and the sour runs the length of the piece because it is in the fruit rather than on it. Sweetness differs the same way. In the candy kind the sugar is the body. In the fruit kind the fruit's own sugar sits beside its own acid, and the sour brings the rest.

The panel is the receipt

The front of the bag can say anything that fits. The back has rules. Under the FDA's labeling regulation, ingredients are listed in descending order by weight, so the first word is what the candy mostly is. Corn syrup or sugar first, and it is the first kind. A fruit first, and it is the second. Three more lines settle it. Gelatin means a gummy went into the chamber. A named dye, Red 40 on most of the red and pink ones, means the color was added; a fruit lists no color, because the color is the fruit's. And the acids, citric and malic, sit high on a sour list and low on a sweet one.

Then the Nutrition Facts panel. The FDA counts sugars from syrups and from concentrated fruit juice as added sugars, and the panel has a line for them. On a bag of our sour freeze-dried strawberries the sour is the added sugar, and the panel says exactly that: 22 grams of total sugars in a 28-gram portion of 20 to 22 pieces, 14 of them added, and 100 calories, which works out to about 60 calories per 12 pieces. The ingredient statement, in full: Strawberry, Sugar, Maltose, Glucose, Apple Juice Concentrate, Modified Food Starch, Citric Acid, Malic Acid, Natural Flavor. Nine ingredients, and the first one is the fruit.

The kind we make

REFRESH'D makes the second kind. Five fruits, strawberries, blueberries, grapes, mangos and pineapples, each Infuz'd with sour all the way through and freeze-dried until it crunches, and a variety pack with one of each. The five are on one page, freeze-dried candy that started as fruit, and the full lineup, with every ingredient statement and every panel, is on the sour freeze-dried fruit product page. It is still candy. It carries sugar, and the panel says so. The first word on the label is a fruit. 💧