Well, it was bound to happen. And for us it happened pretty much immediately. High on the success of our skittles adventure, we decided to go straight to starburst.
Whoops. LOL
Only a few minutes into our adventure, we wandered back to the freeze dryer and saw the starburst slowly exploding into some sort of mutant cotton candy alien creature. I probably would have panicked a lot more if Donna had not suggested we put parchment paper on top of the starburst to protect the shelves in case they got too big.
Boy, did they get too big.
Our mistake was most likely two-fold: 1) warming up the starburst lets them expand during the vacuum freezing portion, but ours were warmed unevenly in the freeze dryer so some expanded a lot more than others. I think if I tried this again I would do it in the oven to try to get them more universal–and to control how soft they got.
2) Well, we should have cut them in half. Or into quarters. Even the ones on the bottom shelf that did turn out were pretty huge balls of admittedly delicious flavor bombs with a spun sugar consistency. They crunched and were messy if you couldn’t put the whole thing in your mouth at once!
The good news is, even though this made a huge mess, the Harvest Right turned out to be pretty easy to clean. You can unplug the shelves and take them out without issue, and freeze dried candy powder basically just melts away if you let water touch it. Getting the bits of sugar off our table was honestly harder than this part!
There is probably no better way to convey how this went down than to recreate the series of increasingly unhinged bluesky posts.
1:01 PM – HERE WE GO
1:17 PM – LOLOL SO UH WE LEFT A LOT OF SPACE FOR THE STARBURST BECAUSE I HAD DONE SOME RESEARCH BUT THEY SEEM TO BE GETTING LARGER LOLOL GODSPEED US
1:17 PM – WE PROMISED YOU CHAOS
2:57 PM – The good news is, these are designed to take out and wash. I swear we used the settings they suggested in the app BUT THIS CHAOS IS CHAOTIT. However they are like crunchy Starburst flavored cotton candy and I get it now. I suspect if I do it again I will cut them up a lot. Lol
2:58 PM – Follow the YouTube channels for elegant freeze dryer content. Follow us for all the ways you can cause total (if delicious) anarchy
At the end of the day, this still tasted annoyingly good even if the mess was not worth it. I will try again some day for sure!
Enjoy the Starburst Chaos
