We like to use a vacuum sealer or butcher paper (often both).
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If you use plastic bags, get the super-thick freezer kind. Package it together into one frozen solid mass.ģ) Wrap your food very tightly in something freezer-proof.
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Think of the movie “Airplane” when the door to the plane opened in flight.Ģ) Get your food cozy. Every time that door opens, you reset the cycle of equalizing the cabin pressure. Open the door as infrequently as possible and for short duration.
So apart from telling you what not to buy the next time you are in the market for a fridge (or for those quick frozen fish), these are my best suggestions:ġ) Don’t stand there and gawk. There is more surface area to the food when the food items are loose in the bag. You’ve also probably noticed that the quick frozen chicken “burns” faster than the solid hunk of chicken packaged by the meat counter. Back to the equilibrium-it uses a heater coil to melt ice, but that throws off the pressure in the compartment. It’s seems contradictory that a “frost-free” or self-defrosting freezer would give you more of the problem instead of less. Two things increase the likelihood that you will have an ongoing battle: a self-defrosting freezer and quick frozen food products (“Freezer Burn.”, 2009). The result is this-the more ice buildup you have in your freezer, the more freezer burn you will get, creating more ice in your freezer. The equilibrium never really happens, so it is a vicious cycle. That ice is immediately drawn to the coldest surface to be found-the coils (or condenser) in the floor and sides of the freezer. The other half of that cycle (remember 1 st grade science class) is that the vapor in the air is condensing into ice. The whole reason that the moisture is sucked up and out of the food is because the vapor pressure in the container is different and it’s all attempting to equalize. It’s all about equilibrium, and no I’m not waxing philosophical here.
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How could the food be dehydrated and full of ice crystals at the same time? If the container is not perfectly airtight, those vapor leave to equalize with the “cabin pressure” of the entire freezer, never to return to that food product. If you say “But I’ve had freezer burn happen to that sealed plastic bag of garden zucchini,” all that I can say is I can relate! But in that case, it is because that plastic bag was not perfectly airtight. If the food is very tightly wrapped, the water vapor has nowhere to go and the food will not go to waste. Freezer burn is from sublimation, when the solid ice goes straight to vapor and skips the intermediary liquid step (Schmidt & Lee, 2009). In 1 st grade science we learned the three stages of water as being solid, liquid, and vapor (gas). The science says that the food itself is safe to eat, although who would want to? You can simply cut off the freezer burnt section either before or after cooking with no ill effects-unless you count the waste of food. The color, texture, and flavor are compromised, the latter due to lipid oxidization (Schmidt & Lee, 2009). It’s a combination of dehydration with the decomposition (or degradation) of the food quality. The food is not “burnt” at all it has suffered a loss of moisture.
#Freezer burn chicken how to#
So let’s take a look at what causes freezer burn, what preventative steps we can take to avoid it, and how to clean the freezer out. Although canned meat is very tender and flavorful, most people simply do not do that enough because of the convenience factor of the freezer. We all know that long-term freezing is costly, it compromises quality, and the food perishes at a faster rate than other food storage methods.
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