The Powder Drawer: What to Do With a Batch That Crumbles

Every freeze-dryer owner eventually opens the chamber and finds dust. Maybe the fruit was over-ripe, maybe the slices were thin, maybe it went a few hours longer than it needed to. You are not going to eat a bag of strawberry dust with your hands.

For a long time I treated those batches as a loss. I do not anymore. There is a whole shelf in my kitchen now that exists because of the crumbles, and it gets used more than the snack bags do.

What The Powder Is Good For

The most obvious use is smoothies, and it is a good one because you were going to blend it anyway. A spoonful of strawberry powder in a smoothie is more flavour per gram than fresh fruit and it does not water the drink down.

Stirred into yogurt it becomes something closer to a fruit yogurt than anything you can buy, because the powder rehydrates slowly and stays a little grainy, which I like. My kids call it the pink yogurt.

Baking is where it earns its place. Anywhere a recipe calls for fruit and you do not want the water, powder is the answer. Muffins, quick breads, frosting, pancake batter. A tablespoon of raspberry powder in buttercream is a genuinely different thing than raspberry jam, and it does not make the frosting run.

The one I did not expect: savoury. Tomato powder is the best thing that has come out of my machine that nobody asks about. A spoonful in a pot of soup or a braise tastes like the middle of August, which is a strange and wonderful thing to have in February.

How To Make It On Purpose

Once I realised I liked the powder, I stopped treating it as an accident. Now I run at least one tray per big batch specifically to be ground.

Dry it a little further than you would for eating. A snack-grade piece still has a bit of give; powder wants to shatter. Then grind in small pulses. A food processor works, a spice grinder works better for small amounts, and a blender is the worst of the three because it heats the powder and it clumps.

Sift it if you want it to behave in baking. The coarse bits left in the sieve go into tea or into the dog treats, which is a sentence I did not expect to write when I bought this machine.

Storing It

Powder is more exposed than pieces, so it is more sensitive to humidity. Small jars, filled close to the top, kept out of light. I use the little half-cup jars because a big jar that gets opened twenty times is a big jar of clumps by the end of the month.

And label it. Powder all looks the same colour in a jar under a cabinet, and tomato powder and apple powder are not interchangeable in a batch of muffins. I have made that mistake exactly once.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC