My in-laws just bought a larger deep freeze and said we could take their old one. I am trying to figure out the best way to use it.
We have a Costco membership and usually buy our meat and fish in bulk, then bag them up for dinner servings. My wife and I have been starting to meal prep on the weekends (mainly prep work of cutting veggies up) and have been bagging and freezing those as well.
We buy a decent amount of fast snacking food to heat up in the oven or air fry, and thats where I am getting confused.
Is it best to meal prep/store meat in a deep freeze, or should we keep all of that in the upright fridge/freezer and put frozen pizza, French fries, chicken chunks, etc in there?
Also if anyone has recommendations for a cheap vac seal machine that would be cool.
The freezer in your kitchen is what you go in/out of daily.
On a weekly/monthly basis you move stuff from deep freeze to kitchen freezer.
You want to minimize the amount of times you open/close the deep freeze.
Think of it like your hard drive, and the kitchen freezer as your ram.
Only on the fediverse can I expect to see someone explain how to manage their kitchen with a computer analogy and not the other way around
It’s good advice though, I have no notes
While that’s what people I’ve seen tend to do for convenience — using chest freezers in out of the way places because they already have a combination fridge/freezer in their kitchen, in terms of energy cost of opening the door, it’s the other way around. Opening a chest freezer doesn’t cause as much loss of cold air as a side-opening freezer. The heavier cold air doesn’t spill out the side.
kagis
The way that these freezers open also impacts their energy usage. When the door is opened in an upright freezer, large sums of cold air are let out and heat is let in which draws more energy to re-cool the system. Whereas with a chest freezer, there is less cold air loss when the door is opened, the larger depth of the freezer also helps reduce cold air loss, resulting in less energy being needed to restabilize the cold temperature in the freezer.
If you have room for it in a kitchen, it’d be totally reasonable to use a chest freezer for day-to-day use. I wouldn’t have space for one, myself.
EDIT: To extend the analogy, the upright freezer is more like a small internal solid state drive on a SATA bus that came in a desktop from the OEM — you probably already have one, but it has limited capacity and there is a higher access cost — and the chest freezer is like NVMe.
Opening a chest freezer doesn’t cause as much loss of cold air as a side-opening freezer.
That’s not the concern, deep freezes are way more efficient.
The problem is allowing moist air to enter.
Ice builds up, but it keeps running, eventually you’ll have ice inches deep and it’s liable to rip the insulation off the lid when you open it.
Normally that takes years, but if you’re going into it multiple times a day, you’re going to need to do full thaws a lot more regularly.
I can tell you from experience make sure that if the outlet you plug in to is GFCI protected have power loss alarm rigged up. Get a small generator for power outages. Nothing more frustrating than throwing away an entire chest of spoiled food.
If there are just two of you and if you are buying your meat from Costco, ad other retail outlets there is no point in buying huge amounts. The price doesn’t change. you are just taking on the task of storing the meat.
If you are going to an auction and buying a whole cow, yeah you will want a huge freezer. Just get ready to deal with hundreds of pounds of meat.
I would just get rid of of the thing.
If the chest freezer has the ability to turn off the “frost free” functionality, do it.
Every time you open a freezer, moist air from the outside gets pulled in, and that moisture freezes onto the walls and contents after you close the door. Over time, this leads to a significant build-up of ice that can impede the freezer’s ability to cool and your ability to remove items in there (it starts on the walls, works its way to the centre, engulfing packages it encounters).
That “frost free” feature is the freezer literally letting the interior defrost so that the ice that has built up on the inside walls can sublimate away. Problem is, both ice and food defrosts, which means moisture has the ability to migrate out of the food yet remain trapped in the packaging, “burning” the food and making it inedible by drying it out.
And because water has a high specific heat, this freezer burning process accelerates as the food dries out - food that is meant to be moist but has dried out can freezer burn faster than food that is still moist, because it takes a lot more energy to melt ice than warm up dry foodstuffs.
By turning that feature off, you have to choose one cold day every year (where it is at least -10℃ outside) to empty out the freezer and carefully chip all that ice out (which could be once every several years if you open the freezer only once or twice a month), but the benefit is that any food in there will be good so long as it never defrosts before you use it. You could chuck in a vacuum-sealed hunk of meat, and it could still be edible two decades down the line provided it never had the opportunity to get anywhere close to 0℃.
If there is no option to turn off the frost free functionality, then your best bet is to adopt a tracking system (spreadsheet, app, whatever works for you) that can effectively tell you what’s in the freezer and how long it’s been in there, allowing you to rotate stuff back out of that freezer in time for you to eat it before it becomes freezer burned.
If it’s a top-loading freezer, rotate out the food you have on the bottom regularly or it’ll go to waste.
Get yourself a vacuum sealer.
Costco sells vac sealers and bags.
We get the giant pork shoulders from Costco and cut them in to meal sized chunks and vacuum seal them along with lots of other stuff. I cut cardboard boxes to fit inside the chest freezer to partition meat and frozen fruits separately. Makes it easier to pull the box out and get what you need as well otherwise sometimes things can settle as one giant frozen block. Best deal on vacuum bags I’ve found is Amazon but be sure to read reviews. We got a box of them before that were so thick that the machine had a hard time sealing it.
Is it best to meal prep/store meat in a deep freeze, or should we keep all of that in the upright fridge/freezer and put frozen pizza, French fries, chicken chunks, etc in there?
It’s all preference but I’d do things based on door openings. If you don’t need to access something that week then it should move to deep freezer where door never opens.
bananas go in the freezer, along with frozen fruit juice that comes in seasonally.
