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Baby, it’s cold out there — and in here

The art of freezing your meat

Brrrrr. This slice of Arctic air isn’t the only thing that’s freezing.

Just about all of us have a freezer of one size and temperament or another. Into it we regularly shove food. And take it back out regularly, or not so regularly.

It took me a very long time after I left the exceptional kitchen facility my mom ran to figure out that a freezer wasn’t a black hole into which you could disappear food and expect to retrieve it back in a year or three, good as new.

This type of thinking may be genetically programmed in Canada. We’ve all had a great-auntie somewhere on the prairies or in the Interior, Lord knows I’ve had about three of them, whose freezers were museums. You’d be sent down to the basement to retrieve some vanilla ice cream for dessert and there it was, a hulking metal behemoth across from the furnace, humming purposefully in the dark with its tiny orangey indicator light showing, in the spirit of a true Canadian, it wasn’t letting anyone down.

When you lifted the lid it looked like the inside of the central bank in Jack Frost’s hometown, stuffed to the gills with solid bricks of things pallid and white and grey and seemingly important, for they were organized and properly fitted to use up all the space. Delicate, decorative hoar frost crystals sprouted in every crack.

But lordie, what was all that stuff? Aunt Georgie and Uncle Gordon, well, there was only the two of them, and here was enough food, if it ever thawed, to supply a whole village in south Asia.

Through the layers and layers of wax paper and Saran wrap you could just make out in the weepy light an entire family history. Sort of like digging down through a midden.

Uncle Nick’s moose meat sausage from last fall’s hunt in Peace River. Clumps of frozen Christmas cake from two Christmases ago. Blocks of what must have been hamburger blanched to grey. Foggy plastic cartons of scary leftovers. Porterhouse buns, hard and eviscerated to nothing, which you just knew were stinky with so much fridge taste that no one would ever eat one. In fact, likely no one ever ate most of that food, except for the ice cream.

Freezers, including the tiny ones on top of your fridge, aren’t really eternal storehouses for food, especially meat. No matter how cheap that chicken or roast was when you got it on sale, you won’t be able to redeem any value, nutritionally or otherwise, if you expect to freeze it forever and use it whenever.

The frozen reality inside your freezer

People have known for centuries that cold prevents meat from spoiling as quickly as it would have otherwise. According to Harold McGee in his classic On Food and Cooking , refrigeration works because the bacteria and enzymes always present in meat are less active at low temperatures. But even so, spoilage continues in the fridge, and the freezer.

Given the average piece of chicken has a bacterial count of 10,000/ sq cm on a good day, even at 4 degrees C the surface will become slimy in about six days, indicating a 10,000-fold increase in the bacterial population. (Chicken has all that bacteria to start with because of its skin; a typical piece of pork has several hundred bacteria per sq cm – two more reasons to go vegetarian.)

And here’s a cool fact to consider before you toss that nice chunk of coho into the freezer: Fish enzymes and microbes may actually prefer cooler temperatures, since they are accustomed to the cold.

Freezing extends the storage life of meat by bringing biological processes dependent on water to a halt. Still, chemical reactions like oxidation continue slowly.

Ideally your freezer should be set to -18 degrees C. (Check yours. Most are in the range of -9 to -12 C.) But even at ideal freezing temperatures, you get problems.

Freezing is an extreme process and it inevitably damages tissues. It results in a process called drip, whereby the fluid in the meat, which is rich in proteins, vitamins and salts, is lost. When the meat thaws, a viscous pool of water leaks out. Drip starts when ice crystals form between muscle cells, where the concentration of salts is the lowest. The crystals intrude on the soft cell membranes and may puncture them, taking up more moisture from the membrane and leaving behind a concentration of salts and enzymes in the tissue.

The bottom line: the meat is dryer and tougher when you cook it. Fish is even more susceptible.

Freezer burn can happen since the concentration of water in the meat is higher than the air in your little or not so little freezer. Ergo the outside of your chops or roast pretty much ending up with a weird colour and a freeze-dried effect, not too tasty or tender.

Another problem: freezing actually promotes the oxidation of fats, especially the unsaturated fats in pork and chicken. For the same reasons that freezing denatures proteins, it also alters fat molecules. The result: rancid flavours like the old pork chops Aunt Georgie used to serve.

Quick or flash freezing, like they do on fishing boats, is the best way to tackle these problems. But given you likely don’t have a flash freezer unit, the best you can do at home is to freeze your meat as quickly as possible (scatter it around the freezer so more cold air gets to it faster) and use really good wrapping for storing it, preferably insulating butcher’s paper and tightly wrapped layers of water-impermeable plastic wrap. The old trick of freezing chunks of fish in bags of water can also help this more delicate tissue.

But remember, however you cut and freeze it, these processes can’t be stopped completely. The bottom line: you can get away with freezing your beef for a year because its fat is largely saturated and relatively stable. As for poultry, fish and pork, keep those to a few months or less. And just use those Styrofoam Porterhouse rolls for party games.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who freezes at the first whiff of fridge taste.