cherries freezing?

Question

Does anybody know how to freeze dry cherries for saving through the winter months.I have arthritis and i read freeze
dried cherries were great for the pain ,only two a day was the report for maintaining the pain.?

Answer 1

Freeze-drying, or lyophilization, is the removal of water content from frozen food. The dehydration occurs under a vacuum, with the plant/animal product solidly frozen during the process. Shrinkage is eliminated or minimized, and a near-perfect preservation results. There is no real invention of a freeze-dryer. It appears to have evolved with time from a laboratory instrument that was referred to by Benedict and Manning (1905) as a "chemical pump". Shackell took the basic design of Benedict and Manning and used an electrically driven vacuum pump instead of the displacement of the air with ethyl ether to produce the necessary vacuum. It was Shackell who first realized that the material had to be frozen before commencing the drying process - hence freeze-drying.

The fundamental process steps are:

Freezing: The product is frozen. This provides a necessary condition for low temperature drying.
Vacuum: After freezing, the product is placed under vacuum. This enables the frozen solvent in the product to vaporize without passing through the liquid phase, a process known as sublimation.
Heat: Heat is applied to the frozen product to accelerate sublimation.
Condensation: Low-temperature condenser plates remove the vaporized solvent from the vacuum chamber by converting it back to a solid. This completes the separation process.

Here is a link to more information on the web:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=home+freeze+dryer&sp=1&fr2=sp-top&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t400&ei=UTF-8&SpellState=n-676035470_q-LncTaXFY4VvT4rM294DA5AABAA%40%40

Answer 2

Here is a site which tells all about freezing and other methods of preserving cherries and other fruits and vegatables: http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/freeze.html
Ronco also makes a fruit dedydrator which preserves fruit, but uses heat.
Another site telling of cherry preserving:
http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/SEASONS/chertext.html

Answer 3

my grandma puts the cherries in a jar sugar and then she freezes ittt

Answer 4

Put them in a vacuum sealed bag and into the freezer.