Whats best way to seperate foods in a chest freezer?

Homesteading & Country Living Forum

Help Support Homesteading & Country Living Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Bacpacker

Bacpacker

Awesome Friend
Neighbor
HCL Supporter
Joined
Dec 4, 2017
Messages
18,321
Location
East Tn
I hope this is the right area for this topic.

Spent most of the weekend defrosting and sorting out old and no good foods from what is still in good shape. Did the upright first and that went very well. But when I got in the chest I found stuff had gotten mixed and nearly half of it was just a jumbled mess in bad need of sorting to keep things easy to find when needed. It has one basket that sits up near the lip and will hold a fair amount. And there is a shelf that is just above the compressor. Other wise it's totally open 15.6 cubic foot freezer.
I'm trying to figure out how best to load it back up to keep things seperate and be able to pull out a entire "box" to access one below the upper. I'm not sure what would work best and looking for suggestions. I've been thinking about milk crates as they are stackable and would fit together pretty well, but not sure that is my best option. What'd yall think?
I'm also considering loading a single "box with a varitiy of good that would more or less be consumed together, then move on to the next "box". My thought are that this would help keep things rotated over time. I threw out stuff that had gotten buried over time. I found some stuff from 11 years ago. And it kills me to throw away food that I know we worked hard to preserve.
Anyway throw some ideas at me.
 
First thought3

Crates will limit your storage a bit6.

An inventory may be a good solution. The Princess does a good job of keeping it mentally since she empties the chest freezer to defrost it regularly.

Ben
 
Bacpacker said:
Yes it ill cut down on space somewhat. But I'm willing to deal with that as there are just 2 of us and we have 2 freezers. We aren't super tight on space, short of getting a cow slaughtered.
Click to expand...
Good then combine an inventory with numbered crates would make it easier to defrost and purge.
 
Maybe see if you can order chest freezer racks that fit your type of chest freeze.

These are like ours in our Darby chest freezer but we only have two that came with it,far as bottom racks not sure, maybe some ideas below.

1603673498541.png


1603673310603.png
 
I like your idea of stacked crates. Just make sure you defrost your freezer often enough so your crates don't freeze together. Or make it a habit to move each crate a small amount once per week to break any frost build-up so they don't get stuck together tenaciously.

When we were young we bought a super large freezer for the basement. We noticed that the self-defrosting ones did not have as much internal space. Since we wanted a Binford 2000 size freezer, we bought a non-self-defrosting model. What a mistake! We still have that freezer, decades later. And sometimes I think it has more frost in it that food.
 
In case we ever set up the solar we got
Haertig said:
I like your idea of stacked crates. Just make sure you defrost your freezer often enough so your crates don't freeze together. Or make it a habit to move each crate a small amount once per week to break any frost build-up so they don't get stuck together tenaciously.

When we were young we bought a super large freezer for the basement. We noticed that the self-defrosting ones did not have as much internal space. Since we wanted a Binford 2000 size freezer, we bought a non-self-defrosting model. What a mistake! We still have that freezer, decades later. And sometimes I think it has more frost in it that food.
Click to expand...

Also good idea if you plan to use solar for power,self defroster uses more power too.
 
In one chest freezer I have all chicken and a big turkey. In another chest freezer I have: hamburger on the left, fish, all other beef and hotdogs next, then pork products. Over the bump on the right is frozen veg. Our upright fridge has frozen fruit, butter, chilis, and yeast. Ice Cream, hash browns, tots in our freezer fridge in the kitchen, as well as occasional loaves of extra bread or buns. So, I don't use bins, but I put things in sections. Figure out what you freeze, put like items together, and it won't get lost.
 
I can't stand chest freezers for this very reason and I'm short. And yet we have one. What I do is try to stack things in "columns". All hamburger from the package on top to the bottom of the chest. Otherwise it's a toss-up both literally and figuratively 😖
 
I use cardboard boxes but crates or other containers would work too. Myself, I avoid hard plastic containers as they tend to crack/break easily due to the temps. Soft Rubbermaid is a better solution.

The box size I use allows me to fit about 20 boxes in the freezer. 12 of them get labeled 1 through 12 which denotes the months of the year. In each of those boxes gets a mix of items (normally based on their shelf life when purchased). In the month of January, use all the items in the box labeled "1". Repeat throughout the 12 months of the year. Boxes 1-4 are stacked on top of each other. Just work your way down the stack. I tried boxes 1-4 side-by-side across the top so I didn't have to dig but that became problematic when I bought new stuff for 6 months+ out but then had to dig deep to get to the future month boxes.

The other 8 boxes are a mix of items that can be used most anytime or are used month-in and month-out. Label as to their contents.
 
zoomzoom said:
12 of them get labeled 1 through 12 which denotes the months of the year....
Click to expand...
I envy your dedication to organization. I generally divine how old something is by the amount of frost build-up on the outside of the packaging. Using a vacuum sealer with good quality bags really increases the lifespan of things put into the frost-a-nator. For the stuff I vacuum seal, I write on the bag the date and what the contents are (so I can easily tell a tenderloin from a ribeye). It's the pre-packaged, mostly boxed stuff from the store that I lose track of dates on.
 
Some of the stores around here were requiring/selling reusable bags, I noticed that they just fit in between the dividers, so I sorted my stuff by bag (chicken, veggies, pork, cheese….) and have bags stacked 2 high in each area. The bags were $0.99 and came in several colors, orange, green, blue, and some holiday themes. They are handy, if you need stuff from a bottom bag you can lift out the top one, pull out the bottom one, get what you need, and then put it back. We also do an inventory identifying which bag/area stuff is in, but I have found at even that needs to be updated about every 6 months. We date everything with a sharpie when it comes in the house, doesn't matter freezer stuff to soap, it gets a date... Then it's up to us to decide if it's safe-ish...
 
I found some wire baskets that fit my freezer. They were easy to lift in and out and it was easy to see what was in them. Lost some space but it was better than loosing the bottom half of the freezer. I've used uprights for the last 30 years so I can't tell you where I got the baskets.
 
I use plastic basket from Walmart to separate food. I stack them based on date and food type. No issues and I have used them for years.
 
I use plastic bins and baskets from Wal*Mart too.
But I also use luggage tags to date and label what' in the bins or baskets.
For freezer type meals the dates along with cooking degrees and time on on top of the individual meals, they're then put in food saver bags, dated, stacked in its bin or basket.
Detailed inventory list also helps when making meal plans for the month.
Just what I do.
 
UrbanHunter said:
Some of the stores around here were requiring/selling reusable bags, I noticed that they just fit in between the dividers, so I sorted my stuff by bag (chicken, veggies, pork, cheese….) and have bags stacked 2 high in each area. The bags were $0.99 and came in several colors, orange, green, blue, and some holiday themes. They are handy, if you need stuff from a bottom bag you can lift out the top one, pull out the bottom one, get what you need, and then put it back. We also do an inventory identifying which bag/area stuff is in, but I have found at even that needs to be updated about every 6 months. We date everything with a sharpie when it comes in the house, doesn't matter freezer stuff to soap, it gets a date... Then it's up to us to decide if it's safe-ish...
Click to expand...

Glad you got it figured out and its working so good.:thumbs:
Whoops guess who is lost again.
 
Last edited:
Backpacker, your post imspired me this weekend to dig thru all the freezers and get things organized. We have a ridiculous amount of food for what we eat. I did the one big chest freezer one day and tackled the stand up and the other small chest freezer the next day. Sorting thru that stuff is hard on the back....and I don't have back problems. I TRY to keep my stuff all in the same area of the freezer. My burger almost always goes in one spot and steaks in another and roasts in another and pork in another and fish in another, etc., like Amish does. However, if I get a load of stuff in the summer, it usually just gets tossed where it will fit b/c I want to hurry up and shut the freezer door.gaah

I finally got most of the meats in one freezer with cheeses, breakfast meats, shrimp, butter, veges, fruits, etc, in another. The last freezer is mostly wild game with the newest stuff on the bottom. I used milk crates in the wild game freezer and I think that will work pretty good as long as that freezer doesn't get over packed again with misc. stuff.

One of the issues I run into is that I have stuff in there I have no idea what to do with. Some of it is too old for us to eat, so I put them on top so the next time I do something in the crock pot, after I'm done, I'll put that old freezer meat in there and cook it up for the pups using the juices from whatever I had in the crockpot. The pups had a deer heart cooked in roast drippings last week. The pups might as well get some use out of it, and no complaints from them.

On the bright side, I have lots of options for dinners for the next couple of weeks b/c I found some stuff in there that needed to get used up that I didn't realize I had. There's some chicken breasts, pork chops, jerky meat, and fish that definitely needs to get cooked up. It's jerky season anyways so I pulled out 8 pounds to turn into jerky. I also found some steaks and roasts I forgot about too. Also, note to self: do not buy any more butter, cheese, brats, burger, or shrimp!
 
I line my crates and hanging wire baskets with cardboard. I find that when I put the meat into freezer bags the meat is soft and molds to and through the grates and when it freezes it's hard to remove them.

The cardboard doesn't prevent things from freezing but it does make life a bit easier.
 
My newest freezer that is in the milkhouse that contains chicken and a turkey, a ham, and some bread needs to be rearranged with my other freezer so I can pick up two more turkeys tomorrow. Good price for Butterballs if they have any left...89 cents a lb at Aldi. Have been spoiled with raising our own turkeys every year, but will get back on that come spring. So, I pulled out a bunch of frozen veg packets and put them in the dehydrator to make room. We'll see how this goes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top