🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is food in your freezer right now that you put there to save money, and you are going to throw it away instead. You bought the big bag on sale, froze half, and three months later thawed it out and it was mush, or watery, or simply wrong in a way you could not name.

That was not the freezer's fault. Nobody ever hands you the other list, the list of what it ruins. My grandfather gave me the reason on the pond when I was small, and he was not talking about food at all.

We cut ice every January, and there were two kinds of winter for it. A hard one, where it froze fast and came up clear as a windowpane and hard as a stone. And a soft one, where it froze slowly over a mild week and came up white, shot through with lines, breaking in your hands before you got it to the sledge.

I asked why one pond made two kinds of ice. He said it was the same water and the same pond, and the only difference was how fast it took. A home freezer freezes slowly.

It simply does. And when water freezes slowly it forms large jagged crystals, little knives, and food is not a bowl of water. It is water held inside millions of small cells, and those knives burst them from the inside.

So when you thaw it, everything that was held in runs straight out. Which gives you the rule: the more water a food holds and the softer it is, the worse the freezer treats it. Dense, dry, cooked things freeze well.

Wet, soft, raw things do not. The twelve: Salad vegetables, and melon, which surprises people Raw potatoes, and how to freeze them so they work Eggs in the shell, and the two minute version that does work Hard-boiled eggs, because the yolk is fine and the white is not Fried food, and why the microwave finishes what the freezer started Soft dairy, with one fair exception for baking Cream sauces and gravy, and the one change that makes cooking ahead work Pasta and rice sitting in liquid, and why your soup went to paste Mayonnaise, and how to get ahead for a gathering anyway Soft fresh herbs, the oil cube fix, and one word of care about garlic Sealed cans, full jars and fizzy bottles, which can actually hurt somebody Anything already thawed warm, which is the only one about your family's health On that last one, said carefully.

If you thawed meat in the refrigerator and your plans changed, you can freeze it again. That is true, and people throw out good food over it every week. But if it sat on the counter all afternoon, it does not go back in.

Freezing does not kill what causes food poisoning, it puts it to sleep, and warming wakes it up. The freezer is not a reset button. Two things that improve everything else you freeze: freeze it fast, in small flat portions spread against the walls of the box rather than a warm heap in the middle, and get the air out.

And the plain limit. A home freezer will never do what a factory does. They freeze in minutes at temperatures your box will never reach, so the crystals stay too small to cut anything.

You cannot do that at home and there is no use pretending. Tonight, open your freezer and find one thing off this list. Deal with it now rather than finding it in April.

Tell me in the comments what is the worst thing you have ever pulled out of a freezer. And if you have told me your county before, tell me instead how many people you cook for. Next time I want to show you what a freezer is genuinely for, which is turning the cheapest and toughest piece of meat in that counter into three meals instead of one.

I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #FreezerTips #FoodWaste #MealPrep #FoodStorage #KitchenTips #Frugal #BatchCooking #FoodSafety #OldWays #SelfReliance #Homesteading #SaveMoney #HouseholdTips #Freezer