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Post by baslp on Mar 27, 2024 21:18:46 GMT
I finally now know why everything gets freezer burn in my freezer.
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Post by baslp on Mar 27, 2024 21:18:59 GMT
I finally now know why everything gets freezer burn in my freezer.
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Post by calgaryscrapper on Mar 27, 2024 23:17:28 GMT
We grow lots of curly leafed parsley. We wash, dry it then run through my small salad spinner then into a freezer bag (no oil) and roll the bag to remove the air.
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Post by crazy4scraps on Mar 29, 2024 14:54:57 GMT
I think the newer freezers might be better, but I had an entire season of frozen garden produce ruined in one. In 6 months it was all tasting terrible. I had frozen SO much sweet corn. Probably close to 300 quarts. I was so frustrated! Bought a chest regular deep freeze (not frost free) and I can store things for a very long time! I have found beef that is 2 or 3 years old buried in there and is fresh and good! I try to rotate better than that though! LOL I have come up with a better system for me. I bought the more rigid, but collapsible, grocery totes that can fold down. They have handles. I fill those and stack them in my deep freeze. I keep them sorted by beef, pork, chicken, veggies, treats, etc. That way I can lift out a tote or several totes to get to what I need. Things don't slide and collapse on each other. It works so well, and when I need to dig deep - no mess! Oh that’s painful, how awful! It may have been that it was vegetables and not proteins and not your freezer. We don’t freeze many vegetables because I have texture issues. We’ve tried all sorts of frozen veggies and I haven’t cared for almost any of them. The only fresh vegetable that I have tried to freeze was green beans but they were mushy too. I’m not sure if they would have been better in the food saver packaging or not. We need to try it because I can get the French cut green beans I like much cheaper if I buy larger quantities. And while we usually do our shopping weekly, I’d still like to have good vegetables as an option if we have to miss a week for whatever reason, it’s rare that we buy more produce than we will eat in 8 or so days. I just read that cabbage could be frozen though, so we are testing that out right now. I use grocery tote bags in our big yeti when we go camping to keep meal ingredients together, works really well! For us it is definitely the freezer. We have an extra fridge in the garage plus a chest freezer and also a big upright freezer. Both of the freezer only units are not frost free. Things stored in either of those, when properly wrapped, will last a very long time. Anything, regardless of what it is, gets freezer burned rather quickly in the frost free freezer of the garage fridge. We learned the hard way that we can’t store anything ice cream in the refrigerator freezer out there because it doesn’t stay solidly frozen. DH kept trying to move those items into that freezer and they would always get mushy so I would move them back to one of the other ones. It was driving me nuts. We usually use the upright one for all the various meat other than big stuff like whole turkeys or hams. My thought was that we should store the full bags of frozen vegetables and fruit in the chest freezer and the open bags in the refrigerator freezer, then make more of an effort to use up the open bags first so we don’t end up with multiple bags of stuff that get buried in the chest freezer every time we bring something else home from the store. It only marginally works because he doesn’t follow the system and will stick anything anywhere. 🙄 I need to do a declutter of the refrigerator freezer in the kitchen because there is so much stuff in there that is of questionable vintage that probably just needs to be tossed. Then we could just use that freezer for the open bags of stuff and it would be way more convenient.
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Post by crazy4scraps on Mar 29, 2024 15:25:46 GMT
To answer the OP, my mom always had an extra freezer. With a ten person family, it’s kind of a necessity, LOL. She would grow vegetables in her garden or go to a local berry farm when berries were in season and freeze anything we didn’t immediately need. She would buy multiple loaves of bread at the day old Wonder Bread factory store and freeze the extras. Any time something like butter or hard cheese was on sale, she would stock up and freeze. There are lots of things you can stock up on when it’s cheaper and freeze for later.
Pretty early on in our marriage we got an extra chest freezer even though it was just the two of us. My sister’s in-laws had cattle and we could get a 1/4 or 1/2 cow when they went to butcher and it was so much less expensive per pound to buy it that way, plus it was much better grass fed beef. Since the meat was trimmed the way we liked and packaged in the sizes we could most efficiently use, we end up with fewer leftovers and fewer things thrown away.
We do better with actually eating frozen vegetables so that’s mostly what we buy. I should do a better job of freezing the fresh stuff I buy before it rots and ends up getting tossed.
We freeze things like cake, cupcakes, muffins, cheesecake slices and cookies that can be flash frozen, wrapped up well and frozen for later. Back when we had our 25th anniversary we bought way too many Costco cupcakes and had a lot left over. I froze them in their plastic pods, then once frozen wrapped each one individually in plastic wrap then put them back in the pods and back in the deep freezer. I think I finally ate the last one 14 MONTHS later and I was shocked that it was still perfectly fine once it was thawed out.
I always make a full batch of pie crust dough (makes 4 deep dish) and then I freeze whatever I don’t need. Makes it so much quicker to whip out a fresh pie when I don’t also have to make the pie crust dough the same day. I roll it out to 1/8” thickness and then roll them up in parchment paper or cling wrap like the store bought ones and put them in a two gallon size freezer bag. I roll up the excess bag around the rolls of dough to take up less space. That way I don’t have to wait for a huge lump of dough to thaw out enough to roll and I can make my pie faster. They’re also easier to store in the freezer that way too.
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