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From eaten by children as roots to eaten by astronauts as camping snacks, the way we make freeze-dried marshmallows today is all around us. From either the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, to the most highly processed or the most carefully produced, and no matter the circumstance, they’re production is both exact and alluring, almost as good as the taste itself. This deeper look into the production process of freeze-dried marshmallows.
The Magic of Marshmallows: An Introduction
Marshmallows are simple. Mostly sugar and water and air, bound together by gelatin or some other binder, and almost anything good about a marshmallow comes from the combination of those ingredients and how you beat, sift, blend, and bang them to achieve their perfect fluffiness.
Traditional Marshmallow Manufacturing: The Foundation
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Before we get to the freeze-dried variant (which, as you’ll soon see, is very different), here’s how regular marshmallows are made.
It’s been a go-to food experiment for years. I decided to test it for myself. Here’s how: 1. Ingredient prep: Boil a sugar solution made out of typically corn syrup, granulated sugar and water with dextrose (a sugary additive), until the solution reaches the right temperature for the end product. 2. Cleaning: Then clean and sanitise your countertop into a decontaminated environment.
Step 3 Additional incorporation of gelatin: separate process, ie hydration of gelatine in cold water with swelling of ingredients, melting and subsequent incorporation to the sugar solution.
The two are mixed together and then the whole is aerated, which adds air bubbles to the mixture and makes the result — a marshmallow — rise in volume many times over. Aeration is what gives marshmallows their characteristic light, airy feel.
Into this mixture is poured the syrup, which is placed over a fire with powdered sugar and starch added into it. The paste grows thick and flows from the pan in a solid mass. This ‘cordial’ is set and cut into pieces. It is to be coated in more sugar.
The Freeze-Drying Process: The Transformation of Traditional Marshmallows
The end points of the regular marshmallow process are the moment you sit down and snack on a freeze-dried marshmallow at the end. After a batch of regular marshmallows winds its way through the rest of the process, it is fed through a lengthy process of drying called lyophilisation. Lyophilisation simply means ‘freeze-drying’.
Freezing:
At an extruder, the marshmallow mix is pressed into a tube between rotating metal blades: the tube is broken up and frozen rapidly, either by an air-blast or by contact with a cold belt; quick freezing ensures that the ice crystals will be fine, which is important for producing a good quality product.
Primary Drying (Sublimation):
So if we put them in here, they’ll siphon out the water.’ And when we bring the chamber back down to a lower pressure, he said, the ice crystals would ‘sublime’. Meaning, they would go directly from a solid into a gas, skipping the liquid phase entirely. ‘There’s your 95 per cent,’ he said.
Secondary Drying (Desorption):
Thus, during the secondary drying, the last water molecules attached to the internal polysaccharide molecules are driven away as well, ensuring the marshmallow is totally dried.
Packaging:
Living marshmallows are dried, then sealed in purging lock bags that are moisture-proof and allow the sweets to expand but prevent them from rehydrating.
Unique Attributes of Freeze-Dried Marshmallows
Freeze-dried marshmallows are a slightly different creature than their immortal refusnic cousins, and lighter and fluffier than traditional marshmallows, though they too melt right away in your mouth. They do rehydrate back to a texture similar to a regular marshmallow, but that’s more likely to be reserved for hot cocoa and the like.
(This low moisture content helps explain their remarkable shelf life – and their standing as the snack of choice for hiker, camper and, yes, astronaut alike.) Marshmallows, freeze-dried, would make an excellent Planet B food.
The Future of Freeze-Dried Snacks
It is the production process that enabled this – mass-market freezer confectionery most specifically, combining the knowledge of generations’ worth of traditional confectionery production techniques and recipes with those of recent decades’ food science technology – which wed this perfect system to that perfect system of all that is utilitarian, environment-friendly and gustatory in frozen, dehydrated marshmallow to make today’s freeze-dried marshmallow, a product which improved the life, utility and pleasure of an otherwise quite decent foodstuff. And with the further development of freeze-drying technology likely – unless, of course, food technology runs afoul of laws of thermodynamics before advancing any further – more of the same from the snack-production front can be expected.
Whether it’s centuries-old manufacturing methods, or the complex process of freeze-drying, marshmallows offer playful hints about places we can comfortably apply our food-tech or manufacturing innovations of the 21st century. From fires to ice, from meteorites to dirty, falling pork, food – whether burnt or not, slow-cooked or freeze-dried – will always nourish us as our fleeting pioneers in space. We can be thankful that NASA is continuing its search for ever-higher and greater collections of these freeze-dried space food troves so we can share them at the place we stored them all those millennia ago in our Lazarus Machine – here on Earth.