How To Freeze Dry Apple Pie Filling
Jul 6, 2023
Are you thinking about how to freeze dry wedding bouquet to preserve the memory of a beautiful occasion? We’ll teach you how and some tricks to help make it work for you.
Freeze drying flowers is the best way to preserve your bouquet for almost up to a year, instead of just weeks or months.
What’s great about it is that you get to preserve the amazing colors unlike airdrying. Others even say that some of the scents lingers after freeze drying.
It’s also an excellent starter for other methods of wedding bouquet preservation. For example, a resin crafter used silica to dry her flowers before preserving them. It was a long process, made troublesome by brushing out silica carefully to avoid damaging the petals.
With freeze drying, you don’t have to worry about scarring or breaking your flowers. Just do an initial prep, and you can forget about it.
There are many flowers that you can freeze dry well, and these are:
Please note this list is not final. These are just the common wedding bouquet flowers, so feel free to experiment.
Remember to wash your trays as some of these flowers can cause stomach upset.
There are several ways to prepare your wedding bouquet before you freeze dry.
Freeze drying will preserve whatever state your wedding bouquet is in. If it looks fresh, it will look close to fresh afterward. If it seems dry, it’s going to look a touch dryer than before.
Let your wedding bouquet flowers absorb as much water as possible for 12 hours. To do this:
Most of the time, the buds haven’t come to a full bloom yet in most wedding bouquets. Keep the flowers in a vase and change the water daily until the flowers bloom. If others come to full bloom before the others do, freeze dry them before they wilt.
Once your bouquet has drank up its fill, It’s time to prepare your flowers. For big flowers, you can cut the stems just below the pedicel or peduncle. Cut the stems short enough, so the flowers fit inside the freeze dryer chamber. But long enough to keep the form of the flower.
For smaller flowers like Baby’s Breath, no need to do this. You can keep the stems and just cut them to fit the tray. They’re going to look beautifully preserved with their long stems attached.
Once you cut and prepare the flowers, it’s best practice to dunk them in water. This way, the flower petals won’t dry out too fast that they brown and lose their colors.
Pre-freezing your bouquet of flowers is an option, so you can go with or without. But there are two methods of freezing you need to know. One is slow freezing, which you get with your freezer (yes, even industrial ones). The other is flash freezing, which you can only achieve with liquid nitrogen or dry ice.
Slow freezing causes large ice crystals to form in flower cells, causing some damage to the texture and appearance. Flash freezing, on the other hand, forms smaller ice crystals, so they keep the appearance of the flower, which you will see here.
Whatever method you choose, make sure that you act quickly. Keep the flower from thawing to preserve its form when you freeze dry.
Once your preparations are done, it’s time to start freeze drying your wedding momento.
The process can take about 24 hours or longer, depending on the size and thickness of your flower. The outside temperature will also affect the freeze drying time. Don’t worry; you can always extend when you need to without damaging the flower.
What’s your plan for your wedding bouquet? Do share your story (and your favorite wedding memory) in the comment section.
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Jul 6, 2023
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