We have owned a freeze dryer for about four years and have had a freeze drying business since 2022. Last October we move into our commercial building where we are a licensed commercial food processing plant. This year we will be expanding our operation to include expansion for dairy operations. I'm retired with a back ground in nutrition and initial bought a freeze dryer for the benefits of preservation as we live in a rural area and grow a big garden. Though after viewing several You tube videos include Phill's. My obsession with freeze drying turned into a hobby to a part-time cottage business now to a full-time commercial business. Phil no worries, I told my wife Brian at Retired @ 40 is to blame. Your safe:) Although your videos have been vital on our succuss and have helped guide us along on our journey. We definitely could not have done this with out your help. You always have to be so careful what you view read, view on social media. So many times people take someone's word just by the fact that they may have a MD, PHD after their name or by the amount of subscribers. Sometimes it comes down to knowing the science and being able to educate yourself and if you can meet in the middle with what the person is conveying then in the end you both should come up with the same hypothesis. In my opinion Phil deliver time and time again.

Distilled water is what leaves the machine, using distilled or purified rain water, will not add any tap flavours,

I think once you add the powder and water together. You should use a blender to mix everything together good. Then let it sit in the fridge for a bit to chill. I freeze milk and when it defrost it would separate, no matter how much I shake the gallon it will always separate later. But if I use a blender and let it sit in the fridge for a few minutes. It doesn’t separate. So I think you should blend the powder and water really good and no one can tell the difference.

Now you know why engineers have grandkids, so they can experiment on them lol 😂

Ugh wish i had taken that last step and powdered my milk. Eggs too. Or well from now on i will take the time to powder. Thanks for the video. Intersting that glass number 4 was in question for wife and grand daughter. Love your videos❤

Also you can 0ut it into freezer bags and rhen freeze it and take it out frozen and put it in rhe freeze dryer

Thanks. I don't drink milk but sometimes I need milk to cook with, if I buy milk it goes bad before I can use much of it so I have been buying powdered milk. According to the USDA pdf Whole milk with 3.7% fat weighs 8.60 pounds per gallon so for a quart it is 2.15 pounds and converted to grams it is 975.2236 grams. I think you are right weighing it is the best way , Thanks

I had a problem when my wife said, after she tried the first reconstituted milk, she didn't like it. I then used hot water instead of cold which made it better but not good enough for her liking but when I used filtered water she couldn't tell the difference. We are on very soft well water with trace amounts of sodium, I can imagine that milk reconstituted with chlorinated city water would taste different, too.

You are being ardent! 😯 always enjoy your videos!!!

To make the metric easier, instead of using grams (weight) use the volume measure ml (millilitres). A metric 250 ml cup is a bit smaller than an Imperial cup (284 ml) or a bit bigger than a US cup (236 ml) but generally in the neighbourhood of similar size. Knowing that four metric cups equals a litre, it should be easier in the mind to do the reconstitution calculations. Rather than redoing your video, you could just add this information into the description. Note: Imperial Quart = 1.136 L. US quart = 946 ml. That has always been a chaos of confusion especially with gas prices crossing the border back and forth. We do gasoline in litres in Canada now.

Just finished packing up a "How does it turn out?" gallon of plain old "red-cap" (AKA "Whole", AKA "3.25% milkfat") milk about half an hour ago. Pre-froze it (in the normal HR trays) in the chest freezer for 2 days (had some other stuff "in line" ahead of it) so it was really good and solid by the time the FD wasn't busy. Hit the "customize" screen and dialed back the tray temp to 37C, and "extra dry time" got boosted to 6 hours as "someplace to start". After 4 hours of "FREEZING" on the display, it kicked over to "DRYING", and it proclaimed itself "done" after 37 hours, 14 minutes of total batch time. Checked it, and it was nice and crispy-dry with no noticeable wet/colder-than-they-should-be spots. So ignoring the 6 hours of "extra dry time", and the 4 hours of "FREEZING", 27 hours of actual "drying" time for the batch. Next batch I'll try it with no "extra drying time" (But I'll be sticking with the 37C tray temp - heat is ALWAYS the enemy of flavor when speaking of milk) Ran the resulting chunks through the food processor to powder everything, dumped the resulting pile-o-powder into a quart jar, where it fit VERY close to perfectly (Just barely had room to shove an oxy absorber into it edgewise) Since I started with a gallon of milk, and got a quart of powder, I went with a "1 part powder, three parts water by volume" mix - pulled out a quarter cup of powder, added 3/4 cup of water (tap-temperature) and stirred the bejeebers out of it, then let it sit on the counter while I vac-sealed the rest of the batch in the jar. It was *SLIGHTLY* difficult to get it mixed (I bet warm water would make it easier - haven't tried yet) but it was nowhere near as hard to get to mix as "regular" powdered milk. When I stopped stirring, you could see definite floating particles, and it had a tiny bit of "grit" to it. (given time to sit, I suspect the "grit" will vanish) As far as flavor, there was that hint of "something's not *QUITE* right" flavor that I get from every "not icy cold" glass of milk I've ever drunk in my life, but not a trace of the god-awful hideous "powdered milk" flavor you get from normal dried milk. I've got the sample chillin' in the fridge, and when it's had a couple more hours to get good and cold (and hopefully soak away the "grit") I'll be giving it another try. So far, I've gotta give it a solid 9.25/10 (Markdown for the "grit") If it turns out the way I suspect it's going to, I'll be revising it to a full 10.

Thanks for doing these taste tests. Really helpful. Thought powdered milk back in the 50-60's was terrible. We drank whole milk, my aunt gave us the powdered. My husband is diabetic, type one and the powdered did not give him the protein that he needed for his diet.

Great video. I've freeze-dried some milk myself, and find that I actually like commercial, spray-dried milk better. Lol, especially with a little Quik mixed with it. Filling the trays with milk to FD is kindof a hassle. I'm going to try making some pre-frozen 'milk sticks' in silicone trays, like the molds you can get to make ice sticks for water bottles. Then simply stack them in the freeze-drier trays to process. Perhaps I'll even make shakes out of the milk beforehand, adding cocoa and malt powder, and maybe even ice cream. This may yield a nice snack stick of sorts after being freeze-dried, which can otherwise still be ground up and and reconstituted. May toss X number of these milk sticks into one's blender, with X amount of water to produce a nice shake of sorts.

I got some whole Vitamin D and some 2% to try, I'll use your formulas they will probably be fine, all I use milk for is cooking and the whole milk has no taste that II can tell. Thanks Phil.

Really good information. I have been freeze drying to store but have not done much reconstituting. Thank you

Thank you. Al of the information you share is extremely valuable and very much appreciated!

Great video thanks

In Europe they go by weight in metric when making recipes so freeze drying by weight would make the most sense for accuracy.

Great video! I haven't been one for weighing things but i certainly will now! But, i will say, my husband thinks it tastes great and he grew up on a farm drinking fresh, outta the cow milk!

After moving to the UK I learned to use weighs (grams) for most recipes. So much more accurate and divisible by 10…

A comment on your conversion and how the weight did not match with the volume markings. The conversion you mentioned is based on a water conversion. I suspect you milk is on greater density than water - milk solids. If that statement is indeed true (I believe it is) - your measurement to quart is telling you you have not reached the correct weight for volume conversion of milk. Since you did your conversion by weight and not volume - the lesson you wanted to show is valid.

Phil, I freeze dry whole milk regularly. I don't have extra freezer space to pre-freeze the trays, so I usually add a couple hours to the freezing time just to be sure it's completely frozen when the drying cycle starts. Sometimes (irregularly, maybe every third or fourth batch) the milk is well behaved during freezing and drying, but in the final drying stage, the nearly dry milk will crack in the trays and "erupt" spraying milk dust and chunks around the chamber. It's a mess to clean up. It doesn't happen every time. Has this happened to you and do you have any ideas on a cause and a correction? Thanks. All of your videos are great but, call me old fashioned, I've never been tempted to freeze dry Skittles.

i need to watch this again. when using measurements, if you go by weight, always go by weight. it's most accurate. mixing weight, metric or u.s. will only confuse. also, the 3.5 fat will always be 3.5 fat. it's doesn't change to 2.7. what changes is the water content.

Hahaha that moo made me jump LOL

The temperature of milk changes the flavor also.

I got my first Harvest Right freeze dryer TODAY! LARGE. SO EXCITED. GREAT DELIVERY TIME! 👍 👌 AS PROMISED. THANK YOU HARVEST RIGHT THEIR THE BEST!!!

If you want to reconstitute just a cup of milk what would the ratios be. And this has been a very good and informative video thank you for doing it.

I'm really enjoying your videos! I heard that you have to keep the room temperature where you're freeze drying under 72 degrees or the pump will not last long at all. Is this true? I live in Florida and during the summer time there's no way I could keep my house that cool.

7:50 I'm wondering if the 1g heavier one was the one you poured first. On whole milk, there tends to be more fat that floats to the top of the jug as it's been sitting since it was "bottled" or sitting in the fridge for awhile, so the first pour usually contains a bit more fat than the subsequent pours. And since the fat doesn't FD as well, that could account for the extra gram.

Great, thank you, new to fd.

I have not tried this yet but after watching your FD egg video on salt & sugar usage cause of protein break down I laughed cause about a year ago I learnt that if you put a pinch of salt into a gallon of milk, we use whole also, when opened & shake that it would extend the self life. I’ve never told the wife I do this & she hasn’t noticed & I can’t taste the difference. Himalayan salt. I wonder if that wouldn’t help with the proteins also with milk??? Something to try. Thank you!

weighing milk, at the beginning of the video, as if it is water ignores the density difference between milk and water. Wouldn't milk be a slightly lower density?? Which would account for your perceived partial glass overage in the gallon.

When you add your chocolate or strawberry or malt flavors the kids wount know I don't drink milk 😢

When I reconstituted my freeze dried milk just after taking it out and then again a month later and the first tasted just like the original milk and the later tasted like powdered milk. I used fat free milk. So maybe after time the taste might change. It is good to know to use warmer water since mine took a lot of time to reconstitute. I used cold water.

Thank you. I'm having to use lactose free milk so I have to freeze dry my own. It's hard to find retail powdered lactose-free milk.

Milk and water don't weigh the same by volume..

What's your advice on FD milk storage?

Off topic Btw, I read that chickens that look like hawks helps deter predators, I have 36 rescues who lost several hundreds of hens and all roosters….2-3 of the survivors are those unique hens…Easter eggers.

Looking at doing our first raw milk run soon here. From your other videos - and info I've gathered on the web - it seems like Standard mode with a temp of less than 90F is the way to go. Does that seem right to you?

Do you pre-freeze because it is more economical or to allow you to have more cycles on your freezer dryer?

Do.have any idea we can store milk in mylar with O2 absorber?

does it expire quicker once reconstituted?

Do you think it would be accurate enough if I just weighed the milk powder from the original milk that was freeze dried and add that as water? Pardon me I am not a scientist, LOL

Love your vids but your "MOOOO" intro was way too load. I would just package it in smaller bags and write on the package to mix the whole bag with x amount of water. lot more accurate to measure the liquid than the powder. Good stuff, thanks