Freeze Dried Instant Coffee is available in powder or granulated form contained in glass jars, sachets, or tins. The user controls the strength of the resulting product, by adding less or more powder to the water, ranging from thin "coffee water" to very strong and almost syrupy coffee.
Freeze Dried Instant Coffee is also convenient for preparing iced coffee.
Uses:
- The use of Freeze Dried Instant Coffee also extends to both general cooking and even haute cusine because in many circumstances it is easier to apply.
- Coffee cake, with its coffee icing, is a staple of parties and festivities
- Freeze Dried Instant Coffee easily flavours ice-cream and sundaes, and is often mixed with equal quantities of chocolate.
- While ground beans offer a purer flavour to the aficionado, Freeze Dried Instant Coffee allows the permeation of flavour to be more evenly spread and consistent.
Prepration:
The basic principle of freeze dying is the removal of water by sublimation.
- Agglomerated wet coffee granules are rapidly frozen (slow freezing leads to large ice crystals and a porous product and can also affect the colour of the coffee granules).
- Frozen coffee is placed in the drying chamber, often on metal trays.
- A vacuum is created within the chamber. The strength of the vacuum is critical in the speed of the drying and therefore the quality of the product. Care must be taken to produce a vacuum of suitable strength.
- The drying chamber is warmed, most commonly by radation but conduction is used in some plants and convection has been proposed in some small pilot plants. A possible problem with convection is uneven drying rates within the chamber, which would give an inferior product.
- Condensation — the previously frozen water in the coffee granules expands to ten times its previous volume. The removal of this water vapor from the chamber is vitally important, making the condenser the most critical and expensive component in a freeze-drying plant.
- The freeze-dried granules are removed from the chamber and packaged.