Wimpy Shrimp
NULL HYPOTHESIS 10 (Shrimp): Shrimp (without tails) Are 60% Water
Conclusion: We Rejected this Hypothesis
Abstract: We weighed a tray of frozen shrimp, the freeze dried them. We used shrimp with no tails because we're really lazy eaters. We found that freeze-dried shrimp only weighs around 15% of its original weight, so we rejected our hypothesis.
Starting Materials:
a 1 lb. bag of frozen shrimp without tails
1 Harvest Right freeze dryer tray with a silicone mat
Above: The top photo is of frozen shrimp slices before freeze-drying. The bottom photo is of the freeze-dried shrimp.
Method:
Start freeze drier to the non-liquid, pre-freeze setting (wait 30 mins.)
Arranged the pre-cooked, pre-frozen shrimp on the tray.
Weighed the tray (subtracting the weight of the tray, of course)
Once the pre-freeze cycle completes, place the frozen trays in freeze-drier (with 3 other trays of food; we did two trays of high class Chef Boyardee Ravioli (it worked!), and one tray of baked Pollock)
Started the freeze-drying cycle.
Removed shrimp from freeze-dryer
Weighed the shrimp tray again.
Our actual total starting weight of shrimp on the tray was .42 kg and the finished weight was .065 kg (not including the tray itself).
Results:
The freeze-drier completed its ordinary cycle at 23 hours. We added 1 hour because we couldn't get to it at the original time. The temperature scanner showed an approximate average temperature of 80° F. We did not find any cold spots.
The difference in weight of the shrimp was .355 kg. We have no way of testing whether anything other than water was removed by the freeze drier, but we believe that most of the liquid removed during freeze-drying is water. We also only did one tray, so we could improve our results by testing multiple trays to confirm our results over a wider sample.
We calculated the weight ratio of the freeze-dried shrimp (.065 kg) to the frozen shrimp (.42 kg) to be around 15.5% of the total original weight. We refuted our hypothesis that shrimp is 60 percent water; It appears that the weight of the water removed during freeze drying is actually around 85% of the original frozen shrimp.