Tips For Making Your Own Freeze Dried Candy At Home

Perhaps you've seen the gorgeous colors and heard the irresistible crunch from countless freeze-dried candy unboxings (unbaggings?) on TikTok and wanted to try your hand at making this whimsical snack. Freeze drying is a simple process to replicate at home; all you require is the right candy, the means to freeze food, and a bit of patience.

For perfect freeze-dried candy, you want to use a type that has sufficient moisture content to manipulate. In the freeze-drying process, nearly all of the food's moisture will get removed; this causes candy that had a lot of moisture in the first place to expand and alter its texture to become crunchier, while intensifying its flavor profile. Candies that have a lot of moisture content include chewy fruit-flavored varieties like salt water taffy and gummy bears. Skittles are great frozen in general, and they transform more dramatically when freeze-dried, making for a fun presentation along with a novel tasting experience.

Once you have your candy, you're ready to freeze it. Just take care to place and evenly space the candy on a tray lined with parchment paper before putting it in your freezer; this layer keeps the candy from sticking to the tray. For the candy to reach proper freeze-dried consistency in a standard home freezer, it will need to stay in there for up to three weeks. While professional-grade home freeze-drying machines are available, these can cost thousands of dollars. Lower-priced models that claim to be freeze-dryers look to function as food dehydrators, which you want to avoid when freeze-drying candy.

The key word in freeze-dried candy is "freeze." When making this treat, you don't want to use appliances that will just dry the candy without removing enough moisture from it to achieve the desired texture. Don't attempt to use a food dehydrator or an air fryer as a freeze-dryer substitute.

A food dehydrator is a type of convection oven, meaning the machine circulates hot air through itself to function. Dehydrators are designed to operate at lower temperatures than regular ovens, which enables them to slowly leach moisture from the food inside — but it does not remove as much as freeze drying will. Applying the dehydration process to candy will cause the resulting product to be chewier and thicker than the viral freeze-dried ideal.

An air fryer is also a convection oven, but in opposition to a dehydrator, it operates by using very hot air to evenly heat and quickly cook food. This function is great for reheating chicken wings in an air fryer but does not work on food that you don't want to crisp up. Your candy will simply cook instead of freeze-dry unless you keep the air fryer at a very low temperature. Even then, it will function more as a dehydrator would, leaving you with overly dense candy.