Freezer storage discussion thread

[Kaido]

This upright freezer thing is kind of awesome - it's like going to the market, except the market is in the garage.

Yeah...at some point I plan on getting a second one. I primary use it for 3 things right now:

1. Raw materials
2. Ready-to-cook items
3. Finished meals

The problem is that I like to buy stuff (1) on sale, and (2) in bulk. Like, I just got 12 one-pound bags of the good brand of walnuts on sale for $5 a pop (vs. $9 normally), so that's nearly a $50 savings, and vacuum-sealing lets me keep them edible for 2 years. Downside is, now I have twelve pounds of walnuts to add to my freezer, which takes up a good 1/2 rack. They get used, for sure (cookies, brownies, fudge, banana bread, yogurt topping, oatmeal, etc.), but then you add in meat, veggies, TV dinner trays, other baking items like chocolate chips, etc. and it really starts adding up. Not a complete list by any means, but among the stuff I like to store:

Raw materials: (vac-sealed, ziploc'd, or packaged from the store)

1. NY strip steak
2. Hamburger patties (6oz 80/20 ground beef for sous vide burgers)
3. Berkshire pork chops
4. Various frozen veggies (broccoli, cauliflower, peas, etc.)
5. 1/2 corn on the cobs
6. Whole turkey
7. Whole chicken
8. Various cheeses
9. Baking items (nuts, chocolate/dark chocolate/white chocolate/peanut butter chips, sticks of butter, etc.)
10. Pork top loin

RTC items:

1. Casseroles
2. DIY Bertolli's frozen skillet meals
3. Cookie dough balls (thaw & bake)
4. Various batters (brownie batter in disposable 8x8" foil pans, muffin
5. Various doughs (puff pastry, pizza dough, dinner rolls - short-term storage due to yeast, etc.)

Finished meals:

1. Make-ahead meals (ex. OAMC stuff like breakfast burritos, regular burritos, soups/stews/chilis/bisques, etc.)
2. Leftovers (typically stored in disposable TV dinner trays)

One freezer for each category would be ideal, but I definitely don't have the room for that at my current place haha. My in-laws buy half a cow direct from a farmer every year (price includes butchering) & then store it in their deep freezer & live it off throughout the year, which is an awesome idea because you get really fresh, tasty meat and the cost is significantly less than buying from the supermarket - downside is that you need an entire freezer to devote to that, so ~$600 for a large one, plus $60/year operating costs, plus the cost of the meat (minus the discount you get over buying it direct), so it's really a longer-term investment & is more about the convenience & the quality of the food for the first year or two until the economics catch up.

 

[Ns1]

Pic?

Btw any tips for vacuum sealing liquids like stews for the freezer? I did not have previous good experiences with this.

 

[Kaido]

Pic?

Btw any tips for vacuum sealing liquids like stews for the freezer? I did not have previous good experiences with this.

Pic of freezer, or of Monoprice vac-sealer? (hasn't arrived yet)

So there are 2 main problems with vac-sealing liquids:

1. It's messy (i.e. needs a machine with a drip tray)
2. Liquid tends to expand when frozen

The workaround is to flash-freeze the liquid (~24 hours) & then vacuum-seal it. The easy route is to get something like a bowl, put the vac-seal bag inside (open end pointing up), fill the bag, freeze it, then vac-seal it. Although you can get more creative with it, like in this video:

https://www.southernliving.com/food/how-to/how-to-freeze-and-store-soup

1. Use an empty cereal box (upright) to store bulk portions (same idea as the bowl method above, but it will come out like a giant, stackable brick)
2. Flash-freeze in muffin trays if you want individual servings, then vac-seal each single-serving for individual quantities

Now, it also depends on how long you are planning on keeping it for. Vac-sealed liquids can last two to three years. I don't know what the exact cycle is on my own freezer, but most stuff gets cycled out within 6 months & a few things stay the full year. Ziplocs freezer bags can do 2 or 3 months just fine:

https://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/simple-storage-tips-how-to-freeze-soup-sauce-and-puree/

I typically use freezable deli containers for my liquid stuff because then I can take one out of the freezer, put it in the fridge overnight to thaw, and microwave it as needed the next day. Web Restaurant has bulk packs, or if you like to use Amazon, Redi-tainer's Extreme Freeze containers are great:

http://reditainer.com/?page_id=29

Bone broth, chicken soup, chili, you name it. I just made some chicken soup in my Instant Pot this weekend...had some for dinner & then froze the rest into a half a dozen individual serving-size containers.

 

[Kaido]

Pic?

Btw any tips for vacuum sealing liquids like stews for the freezer? I did not have previous good experiences with this.

Also, my current approach is "small-batch gourmet meal prep". That means several things:

1. Gourmet: I don't really mean fancy food, I just mean food that tastes really good. My food rating list basically goes like this:

1) Crappy
2) Meh
3) Good
4) Great
5) Rich

Nobody wants to eat crappy food, which is one big reason I follow recipes instead of just making stuff up on the fly, lol...someone else has already put in the time & effort to perfect a recipe & publish it online or wherever. There's a lot of 'meh' food out there, as well. A lot of places & recipes offer good but not great food...I like recipes that are really great. But rich food tends to be too much to eat on a regular basis. So my target for recipes that I consider "keepers" are in the "great" category...not so rich that I won't want to eat them again soon, but good enough that I look forward to eating them, as opposed to say walking down to the vending machine or driving out to get take-out at some fast-food joint. So basically yummy food that I actually want to eat is my criteria for recipes.

2. Meal prep: It's hardly any extra effort to make 3 quarts of chicken soup as it is to make 6 quarts of chicken soup. And if it's a recipe you really like & are willing to eat on a regular basis, then doing meal prep by using deli & TV-dinner containers & vac-seal pouches makes it easy to store everything so that you only have to cook it once in order to get a bunch of usable meals out of it before you have to cook it again.

3. Small batch: Notice I didn't say "bulk" meal prep. I learned the hard way that it's really easy to get sick of eating the same crap over & over again (no matter how good it is). As the saying goes, "too much of a good thing is a bad thing". You don't want to overdose on stuff you like. So instead of making 30 servings of beef & broccoli with jasmine rice, maybe do half a dozen & then only eat them once every couple of weeks. That way the meal kind of has time to "wear off" so that you look forward to it again. For me, this is a crucial piece of my freezer preparation because there are foods that I ate repeatedly to the point where just thinking about them makes me sick, haha. So it's kind of a delicate balance...you have to take a more 'adult' approach of planning things out, instead of just making a bunch of one meal & then going hog-wild on it for a week. That's what happens to most people at Thanksgiving...they eat turkey on the day, then eat it again the next day as leftovers, then make turkey sandwiches, and it feels like it never ends & so we tend not to roast turkey the rest of the year, lol. I think that happens to a lot of people who try to cook at home as part of a dieting approach, especially to get in shape - you make the same plain chicken & broccoli dish, eat it every day, and totally suck the fun out of it (not that that particular dish is especially enjoyable, but you get the idea).

I'll also throw in IIFYM in there, which is the idea of eating according to your body's macro-nutrient needs (i.e. protein, fats, carbs). Meal prep lets you structure your meals to fit your daily gram requirements for each macro, while also letting you enjoy stuff other than plain chicken & broccoli. But that's a whole different topic for another discussion

 

[Kaido]

I just ordered the new Monoprice vacuum sealer. On sale for $64 shipped:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=21596

They have some pretty interesting products (and pricing!) in their new Home Goods line:

http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=thread...eap-home-goods-on-sale-free-shipping.2530937/

It looks pretty comparable to a Foodsaver - for less than a quarter of the retail cost. The 5800 is currently $300 direct from the manufacturer:

http://www.foodsaver.com/vacuum-sea...ing-vacuum-sealing-system/FSFSSL5860-DTC.html

I'll have to remember to report back on functionality. My brother has started to get into food prep & got a deep freezer as well, so I gave him my old Foodsaver & upgraded to the Monoprice model, mainly to get the bag-cutter feature. Looks pretty nice, actually:

Update a month in:

1. Looks nice, feels cheap(ish), has held together so far!

2. Pretty noisy. If you do vac-sealing after you family goes to bed & have a small place, that's something to consider.

3. Does a great job vacuuming & sealing. It works on my commercial-grade bags.

4. I ran out of the included Monoprice bags. The built-in roll storage area is very small & did not fit my third-party 50' roll from Amazon. I pulled probably at least half the roll off to get it to fit (figuring I would rewind later). Turns out the cutting knife is really crummy & won't cut thicker bags. It's like a cheap Exacto knife with plastic handles. This frustrates me greatly because a big part of the appeal was having a compact, upright unit that could storage the bags & cut the bags. Cutting with scissors is a really big pain because the vacuum-sealing area wants a nice, straight cut to both vacuum out & to seal, and it is very hard to get a perfectly straight cut manually with scissors. This actually really annoys me a lot; I'm not sure how I'm going to solve this problem. I tried a cheap paper cutter in the past, and aside from being huge, it didn't work too well on plastic. So I am still searching for a solution. Right now, it's a piece of construction paper to line up the right angle & some scissors. Bleh. I like easy & I like repeatability for consistency.

5. The clamp is annoying to use. It often takes me two or three tries still to get it to clamp properly. I'm quicker at it now, having used it for a few weeks, and you do more or less get used to it, but it's a crummy design.

6. For the money, my only real complaint is the bag slicer, which has proven 100% useless on quality thicker bags. If they ever make a motorized auto-feed bag cutter, I'm down to get one

 

[Kaido]

Update on freezing soups & other liquidy stuff. Leveled-up my freezer storage space via some neat silicone freezer containers: (note: if you plan on ordering two, you can buy two single-packs with the code YAY10K for $30 shipped, as opposed to the email coupon SOUPEREMAIL10, which would be better for a single tray, and both are cheaper than just going through Amazon)

https://www.soupercubes.com/

They aren't the cheapest tools in the world, but I'm sure they'll last a long time (I have lots of silicone molds that I use as ice trays, for egg bites in the Instant Pot, for gummy & chocolate molds, etc.). You can freeze lots of stuff using the Souper Cubes:

• Soups
• Bisques
• Stews
• Chilis
• Sauces

Found out about them through this reddit thread. The design is great: it's like a silicone ice cube tray, except that it's wire-reinforced for sturdiness & has two fill lines on each side for half a cup & a full cup, with 4 compartments per tray. Just check out this freezer pic! (not my photo)

 

[Kaido]

Haven't updated this in awhile. Long story short:

1. I wanted to get a second deep freezer for additional storage (convenience, bulk cost savings, etc.). I have an upstairs fridge/freezer combo now, plus the deep freezer in the basement.
2. My fridge ended up dying, so I picked up a cheap freezer/fridge combo on sale to replace it.
3. I ended up figuring out how to fix the broken fridge later on, so I moved the cheap freezer/fridge combo downstairs.
4. It actually works out pretty well. I use the top half freezer for homemade TV dinners & the bottom for bulk storage & projects (ex. cold-fermented doughs, chilling certain items like Avalanche cookies, etc.)
5. My wife thinks I'm nuts, but because I do the bulk of the cooking now, she doesn't complain lol.

I've been using the Souper Cubes for over a year now. They are an indispensable part of my workflow now. I use them for brown butter cubes, mashing & freezing leftover bananas in, plus the usual assort of soups, broths, etc. Just fantastic.

Ground beef has been interesting. I make smashburgers probably twice a week because they're so quick, easy, and delicious, so I'll freeze a bin full of 2oz balls to use later. They actually got kinda brown-lookin vac-sealed, so I switched to tying them into a little Press 'N Seal ornament, and they stay pink! Not sure why that works, but it works great! I do this with some of my larger cookie dough balls too, that way I can just grab one or two cookies, throw them in my toaster oven, and have a really delicious dessert for one or two people.

Currently experimenting with homemade frozen pizzas (again). Picked up the larger 16" round Baking Steel & they cook pretty well indoors!