Freeze-Dried 101, School Chaos & the First Weeks of Fall

🌀 ORBIT REPORT “Bowling, Hawkeyes, and a Busy Week in Iowa City” This past week has been a whirlwind here in Iowa City. Between working out, starting my new job, cheering on the Hawkeyes, and dealing with car troubles, life has been anything but boring. I officially started a new job at Colonial Lanes, the classic Iowa City bowling alley. It’s been fun learning the ropes and meeting new people—it feels good to stay active and part of the local community. Speaking of staying active, I’ve also been keeping up with my workouts, squeezing them in even when the schedule feels packed. Of course, no Iowa week is complete without football. The Iowa Hawkeyes crushed UMass, 47-7! There’s nothing quite like the buzz of a Hawkeye win to kick off fall energy around here. On the not-so-fun side, our car was in the shop this week, which made juggling everything a bit more of a challenge. But that’s life, right? Highs, lows, and lots of stories in between. Through it all, I kept one thing consistent: Torus Coffee Company freeze-dried snacks. Whether I was grabbing a quick bite before work, munching after a workout, or snacking while following the Hawkeye game, those crunchy, light treats always had my back. 💫 Moral of the story? Life’s busy. Cars break down. Teams win big. But a little cosmic fuel—coffee and snacks—can help you keep rolling through it all. 🌀

A New Job at Colonial Lanes

Learning the ropes at Colonial Lanes has been the best kind of exhausting. A bowling alley is not one business, it is four businesses stacked on top of each other — the lanes, the bar, the kitchen, and the front counter — and they all run on the same schedule. I have spent most of my shifts so far just watching how the regulars move through the building, because they know it better than the new people do and they will tell you so.

What I did not expect is how much of the job is logistics. Shoes to size, lanes to reset, a kitchen that produces exactly as much as the night demands and not a ounce more. I came from a food business of my own, so some of it came naturally, and some of it was humbling. The shoes got me. Nobody warns you about the shoes.

The workouts have stayed in, barely. I have been squeezing them into the corners of the day — early mornings before a shift, or a walk after close when the alley has finally gone quiet. It is not the schedule I would design, but it is the schedule I have, and a workout that actually happens beats the perfect one that does not.

The Hawkeyes crushed UMass 47-7, and I want to be clear that this was not a neutral observation. There is a particular energy in Iowa City after a win like that — the whole town moves differently for about two days. I had snacks in hand during the game, which is the correct way to watch football, and I have no notes on improving that.

That difference is why our snacks weigh what they weigh and crunch the way they crunch. Almost all the water is gone and none of it was cooked out, so the structure holds and the flavor stays where you put it. It is also why a bag of freeze-dried candy survives a warm afternoon in a car and a bag of regular candy does not. I have tested this personally, on accident, more than once.

Why the Snacks Survived the Week

The car being in the shop is the part that made the week hard, and I want to be honest about that rather than breezing past it. Everything that was already tightly scheduled got tighter. Getting to a shift, getting to the gym, getting groceries, all of it suddenly depended on someone else's availability, and there is a particular tiredness that comes from arranging your day around a repair.

What saved it was that the snacks do not need anything from me. No refrigeration, no cooking, no timing. I could grab a handful before a shift, keep a bag in my work apron, and eat something real without stopping what I was doing. On a week where the car was unreliable, having a food that was not unreliable felt like the whole point.

I keep coming back to the same thing when people ask why we do it this way instead of just dehydrating. A dehydrator uses warm air, and warm air cooks some of what it dries. Freeze drying uses cold and vacuum, so the water leaves without the food ever getting hot. That is the entire difference, and it shows up as texture, as weight, and as how long the bag lasts in a cupboard.

The Hawkeyes win was the other thing that carried the week. 47-7 is not a close game, and it did not need to be. Sometimes you just want to watch your team be obviously better than the other team for three hours and then walk around town feeling good about it. Iowa City does that after a win like that in a way that is hard to describe to anyone who has not lived through a season here.

Here is the part I get asked about most, so consider this your Freeze-Dried 101. Freeze drying removes water from food without heating it. The food is frozen solid, then placed under vacuum, and the ice turns directly into vapor — it never melts into liquid water first. That step is called sublimation, and it is the whole reason the process works.

There are three stages. Freezing, where the food goes solid. Sublimation, where the vacuum pulls the ice out as vapor. Then desorption, which is the finishing pass that takes out the last bit of bound water. Freeze drying removes 98 to 99 percent of the moisture. A kitchen dehydrator only gets 80 to 95 percent, and it does it with heat, which is where the nutrient loss comes from.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC