>>419432Keep in mind that "dehydrate" and "freeze-dry" are very different things. You can dehydrate a variety of foods in a dehydrator at home (basically, you can just use heat and a fan even without buying a special kitchen appliance), but to freeze-dry food, you need to put the food into a pressurized, super-cooled container and lower both the temperature and pressure below water's triple point, thus allowing *all* of the water to sublimate out of the food (kind of like how dry ice will sublimate into CO2 gas at normal atmospheric pressure). Freeze-drying is usually an industrial or commercial process, since you need a freezer capable of achieving temperatures well below 40*F that needs to be able to maintain a partial vacuum inside the unit (usually these are very expensive).
With regular dehydration, there will generally be a little bit of water trapped in the food, slightly changing the expiration date and flavor from what a freeze-dried food would be.
