The Collaborative International Dictionary
Freeze-dry \Freeze"-dry`\ (fr[=e]z"-dr[imac]`), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Freeze-dried; p. pr. & vb. n. Freeze-drying.] to remove the moisture from (e.g. food) by first freezing and then subjecting to a high vacuum; -- used as a mild method for drying foods or chemicals while causing little decomposition, in contrast to heat-drying.
Note: This is a relatively gently drying process used to preserve food or sensitive biological materials. For biochemical materials, the term {lyophilize} is often used.
Wiktionary
vb. To remove volatile liquid from a substance by sublimation (normally under vacuum) from the frozen state
WordNet
v. preserve by rapid freezing and subsequently drying in a vacuum; "freeze-dry the strawberries"
[also: freeze-dried]
Usage examples of "freeze-dry".
Design schemata for just about anything a mid-twenty-first-century postindustrial civilization could conceive of, freeze-dried copies of the Library of Congress, all sorts of things.
In the Army they freeze-dry and file a sperm sample and then vasectomize you.
Your freeze-dried grains have the same weight, a shade chunkier perhaps, and with sharp edges instead of round.
Bean goose-down sleeping bag, and a high-tech gas backpacking stove for cooking, with lots of freeze-dried packets of food.
Even though we are cooking beef Bourguignon, fettuccine Alfredo, and various other freeze-dried specialties, he insists that we drop our pretense of having enough and eat his food.
She grinned inside and out at the sight, the table lengthened so that it hardly gave them room to edge around it, the center spread with fantastical culinary artistry, platters of meat, by the gods, no stale freeze-dried chips and jerky and suchlike.
Real vinyl rain ponchos, clothes for antique Barbie dolls, metal cookie cutters, freeze-dried coffee, copper pennies for a pair of loafers, a tether-ball set for the Girl Scout camp or metal paper clips for a hospital charity drive, belt buckles, computer cables, aspirin, and those little rubber tips for the feet of garden chairs &mdash.
Carla Sue made herself a cup of coffee by injecting a blast of hot water into a squeeze bottle containing freeze-dried milk and coffee flakes.
A clutch of dead kzin, freeze-dried in space years before, stared out eyelessly at them from the new cavity in the hull.
Our protestations that we have freeze-dried food fall on deaf ears.
Stacked against one wall were cases of five-pound, vacuum sealed cans of nitrogen-preserved milk powder, freeze-dried fruits and vegetables, freeze-dried soup, powdered eggs, cans of honey, drums of whole grain.
He gets home late, feeds his neon tetras sprinkles of ground-up, freeze-dried poor people, chides us all for not exhibiting more enterprise, and then sleeps.
Powdered eggs and powdered milk and freeze-dried bacon didn't seem to be a promising start for breakfast.
That's why Paul, like most mountaineers, brings precooked freeze-dried food or foods that only need a few minutes in hot water to rehydrate.
They had considerable food, mostly freeze-dried, gear to cook it, tools like knives and a hatchet, cord, cloth, flash-beams, two blasters and abundant recharges: what they required for survival.