You all know how much we like our blanch and freeze preservation method! Every year, we always field questions like, “How many freezers do you have?” Well, we figured you might like it if we showed you what our “big” freezer looks like going into winter.
For as much as we talk about using freezing for our preservation needs, we have surprisingly little freezer space. We operate a small 7 cubic foot freezer and a slightly larger 14 cubic foot freezer. We keep both our our freezers outdoors, reasonably protected from the elements, as it costs us almost nothing to keep them frozen over the winter months.
The smaller chest freezer acts as our “daily freezer” whereas the larger deep freeze is our bulk storage. We regularly transfer frozen goods from the larger deep freeze to the daily, just to keep things closer to our kitchen. Oh, and we do technically have the typical refrigerator with a small freezer, but we mostly use this freezer for immediate and frequent use items.
Chest freezers are kind of a pain to use, if you don’t use them correctly. We try to keep our “daily” chest freezer relatively easy to access and sort through. Our big deep freeze can take some time to sort through to get what we need. When we locate what we need, we’ll bring a few items up to our daily freezer so it’s easier to access next time. Access gets easier the further from the growing season we get.
We are pretty good at getting food density into our freezers. Most things are stored in ziplock bags or in some other reasonably concise way. We often don’t store bulk retail boxes and things like that, often preferring to repackage or organize things to optimize space utilization.
Another important thing we do is sort through our freezers each year. We put “old crops” from previous seasons into bags. This becomes our foremost produce to use for making stock, which we try to consume completely before we start digging into our current season crops. In this case, a little bit of freezer burn or some degredation is less important since we’re only extracting the nutrition and flavors from the produce.
Although it may look like it’s packed with veggies, we are not vegetarians. We do have some meat frozen, but we also regularly maintain our supply. We like to say that we’re not preppers, but we are prepared. We do often buy meat in bulk, enough to sustain small events or logistics issues, but not enough for what people call “SHTF” scenarios.
So yes, our freezers are packed to the gills. But, we draw it down fairly quickly in the fall and winter months, processing stock and frequent use of our frozen produce. While not every meal we make features our home grown frozen produce, most do. Our growing and preservation diversity helps ensure we don’t get burnt out on a given thing, too.
Hopefully this helps clear things up! I can imagine people might think we have multiple huge freezers, but we really don’t. A lot of it is efficient use of what we have, coming from years of experience in using freezer based food storage.
