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.
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.