I was following this really cool recipe to make a kind of snack made mostly of granola, coconut flour and freeze dried strawberries. When done right, it seems to be really photogenic, here is a picture from the blogger:
However, when I got to the part where I'm told to:
Blend your strawberries until fine. Keep extra for rolling bites in batter.
I couldn't get my blender to break up the freeze dried strawberries at all. They just flopped around inside making a ruckus. I checked the blade, and it was in fact sharp. I had to resort to slicing and dicing as finely as I could with a knife to create an effect similar to the freeze dried straw berries in the picture. The result was rather unsightly, probably due to the fact I had more like freeze dried strawberries that were the size of small raisins. In fact, the texture/suppleness of the freeze dried strawberries seemed exactly like that of a raisin too.
Question
How can I achieve a "fine" freeze dried strawberry-flaky result? As I have never worked with freeze-dried strawberries before nor made a similar snack, I'm not sure how to troubleshoot at this juncture. I do have two hunches though:
- while marketed as 'freeze-dried', my strawberries are perhaps not the right kind?
- I have the wrong tool for the job, my blender is a simple one with a spinning two blade apparatus (think cheap Chinese blender). I will say though, it has never let me down in the past.
Best Answer
First off, if they're the texture of raisins, they aren't the sort of freeze-dried strawberries the recipe wants - what it wants is something totally dry, almost the texture of styrofoam. They should crunch if you bite into them, and slowly rehydrate in your mouth if you eat one without crunching. They'll look like full-sized slices of strawberry, only dry. Like this:
The right tool for pulverizing something like this without liquid is a spice grinder or small food processor. If you don't have one of those, put the berries in a plastic bag and crush them with a mallet or a rolling pin.