One of the mundane tasks of ensuring that your kitchen remains the heart of the home is taking care of the food that creates all those family memories. The modern hunter gather, whether it be a precision menu planner or a whimsical shopper, relies on the freezer for food storage…..so as dull as discussing freezer management is, it is essential to understand how to get the most out of your freezer to keep up with the demands of feeding a hungry table.
Simple tricks to ensure freezer efficiency:
- Keep your freezer below 0F. Your food should be frozen solid, anything less opens the door to food
contamination. - Keep the temperature constant. Chest freezers provide better food storage than refrigerator freezers because the temperature fluctuates less. Contribute to a more steady freezer temperature by ensuring the seal is tight, the door is opened briefly and only when necessary.
- Defrost your freezer frequently, it will give you an opportunity to discard old food and give you freezer a better work ethic as ice build up makes it work harder than it should.
- Avoid Freezer Burn. Modern refrigerator freezers have a self defrosting mechanism that fluctuates the temperature, this fluctuation leads to freezer burn. If you are storing items for longer than a month, move them to a chest freezer to avoid the effects of freezer burn.
- Fill your freezer. An efficient freezer is a well stocked freezer. For periods where your supply of frozen food is running low, fill it with a few bottles of water or an inexpensive bag of flour. An efficeient freezer will not only save your food, it will reduce your energy cost as well.
- Vacuum exposed condenser coils regularly to ensure proper air circulation, and to improve your kitchen air quality.
- Package your food appropriately. Food exposed to freezing air deteriorates quickly so stock up on freezer paper and bags, and banish store packaging from your freezer to prolong the life of your food.
Filling your freezer to ensure it does all the hard work for you:
- Most foods can be frozen. I frequently freeze fresh vegetables to prevent waste. Freeze them in air-tight freezer bags to maintain their freshness and use them within a month. However you cannot freeze eggs in the shell, cream, lettuce or cucumber.
- Freeze left over wine (I know, easier said than done). And when left over wine is not readily available, reach into your wine storage and seek out those unwanted wine bottles left over from past dinner parties that are perfect for cooking but no so much for drinking — both red and white varieties can be frozen. There are 2 ways to store wine, first is by the cup in freezer bags, the second is in an ice-tray. Keep in mind when freezing by the cup that when wine freezes, it turns slushy, not rock hard.
- Use ice trays to freeze sauces that you use frequently, then transfer them to a freezer bag once formed. Freezing pasta sauce is a frequent operation in our house, providing countless last minute healthy meals when time is in short supply.
- Freeze left over rice in portion- sized squares wrapped in cling film then stored in a sealed freezer bag. Defrost in the microwave until the rice is fully thawed, then cook until consistently hot througout — the danger with reheating rice is that it can lead to food poisoning, so be thorough when re-heating.
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