Frozen Foods

Food held at 0°F does not spoil; it only loses quality, slowly, as the water in it migrates to the surface and the fats oxidize. The months on this page are the quality clock, not a safety one. The freezer's real weakness is the plug: a chest freezer full of food is the most expensive thing in the house that a three-day outage can destroy, so the last section is about that.

Frozen vegetables and fruit are picked ripe and frozen within hours and often beat the fresh counter for nutrition; buy the plain ones in bags, not the sauced ones. Frozen meals are convenient and short-lived. Meat is the thing a freezer is for; the fresh meat page has the cuts and the times. A chest freezer beats an upright for holding cold, and a freezer thermometer is the cheapest insurance you can buy for it.

Hold it at 0°F or below and check that with a thermometer, because a freezer that cycles up to 15°F is making ice crystals and freezer burn every day. Press the air out of bags; vacuum sealing is the single biggest quality upgrade. Label and date everything and rotate, oldest to the front. Keep the freezer full: a full freezer runs cheaper and holds cold longer, and jugs of water in the gaps are free thermal mass and drinking water later.

Freezer burn is the dry, white or gray leathery patches where the surface dried out: trim it and the rest is fine. Large ice crystals inside a package mean it thawed and refroze at some point; the food is safe if it never got above 40°F, but the texture is poorer. Fatty foods that smell rancid on thawing are done. Frozen food that has thawed in the freezer, pooled and refrozen into a block has had a power failure you did not know about: if the ice cream is soft or the block is there, use the next item.

A freezer is the easiest food storage there is until the day it's not. Plan it as a three-month store, not a three-year one, and keep the long-term food in the pantry. Thaw in the fridge, never on the counter. Keep a quarter in the freezer: a coin on top of a frozen cup of water tells you after a trip whether the freezer thawed while you were gone (the coin sinks).

Do not open the door. A full freezer holds for about 48 hours, a half-full one about 24. If the outage will run longer, the options in order: a generator or power station for the freezer alone (a chest freezer draws little once cold and only needs to run a few hours a day), dry ice (about 50 pounds keeps a full 18 cubic foot freezer frozen for two days), or get the food out: cook it, pressure-can the meat while it still has ice crystals, and eat what cannot be saved. Food that still has ice crystals can be refrozen. Food that thawed and sat above 40°F for two hours is discarded.

Shelf-life figures are from the Survival Foods field guide; fridge, freezer and pantry times are from the USDA cold and pantry storage charts. Run the look, smell, taste check before eating anything past its date.