I'm starting to freeze garden produce, so it became imperative that I defrost the chest freezer now.
I got an early start in the morning, before the day grew too warm. As I mentioned before, most of the contents are already bagged. Bagging like items has helped us keep the freezer organized this last month. But it also made for a very quick and easy transfer of contents to other freezer spaces and styrofoam containers, and then back again to the chest freezer once I had defrosted and wiped it out.
Once everything was out, I just let the freezer do its thing while I baked cookies.
After an hour, I came back and checked the insides. I used a plastic pancake-turner type of spatula (flimsy Dollar Tree variety) to scrape the insides periodically. It took about 3 hours total to get it all cleaned out and dried (don't want residual moisture to turn to new frost).
I don't know if you do this, but I line the floor of my chest freezer with two large plastic bags. So I had to wipe those off as well. The plastic bags keep containers of food from freezing to the floor of the freezer should something spill or burst. The worst case scenario if something bursts is I pull the bottom food items out of the freezer attached to the bags. A few years ago I had a jug of milk that burst in the freezer and froze several items to the floor of the freezer. I had to wait until I defrosted the freezer before I could get those foods out.
As I said, the foods were quick and easy to transfer back into the clean freezer. The whole thing is really an easy job. I don't know why I put it off each year. But I am glad to have this done for the summer.
For those still reluctant to get their freezer defrosted this summer, here are the upsides I found in doing mine.
- It forced me to go through all the frozen food, and I found several very pleasant surprises (croissants, cookies, cupcakes, muffins, blueberries, pecans, and eggs when I needed them).
- It also gave me the opportunity to reorganize all of our frozen foods. As I put foods back into the cleaned freezer, I moved some foods to other freezer spaces and others into this freezer space. We now have a plan for where we will try to store the different types of foods, so we will be able to find things faster, easier, and before foods develop freezer burn.
- It will save us money on electricity. Excess frost inside a freezer makes the motor work harder. Defrosting a freezer regularly should also prolong its lifespan.
- It gave us more room to store foods.
- And it gave me a sense of accomplishment in completing this one chore.
I need to continue working on organizing our food storage spaces. If it were just me accessing foods, I could remember where I put something. But with four of us getting in and out of fridge, freezer, and pantry, things get moved around, and not necessarily to spots that seem logical to me. Kitchen organization is a never ending chore, but it is satisfying as I get things tidied up.
Congratulations on the freezer project! And let me say, the more people who cook/access/put away items in the kitchen/freezer, I agree, the more confusing and awkward it often becomes -- even if everyone is trying to be organized. I've made labels for shelves in the cupboards and freezer, so things have "a place", but they aren't always followed. Sara
ReplyDeleteHi Sara,
DeleteThank you. I label some stuff, but I should really label the freezers. We have 4 freezer spaces. If I could get everyone to put specific foods into specific freezers, at least we'd all know where to look. Labeling the bags in the chest freezer has been very helpful for my husband and daughters. We've not had any extra open bags of veggies (like the 2 open bags of spinach and 2 open bags of peas we found) since bagging all opened bags of veggies together. This will be a project that I keep working on.
I find a deep freezer to be so difficult to organize yet I like it because it holds so much more (my opinion). I do need to clean mine out as well but that will come late summer or early fall. We no longer have goodies from dad's garden since he can no longer garden. He's too old now to be able to that but still lives alone. We have begun to have a strained relationship due to his narcissistic ways and just plain being mean to people. He has always been this way but I can't handle it anymore.
ReplyDeleteIt is taking us a long time to work through the freezer but slowly we are seeing a bit of progress. I have a lot of flour in there right now as a good storage place so I don't have it in the cupboard asking for intruders. I make all our bread products so having a stash is necessary for us. We also like to have a lot of butter in the freezer. Finally, we found some strip steak at a discount store and have a dozen single shrink wrapped steaks ready to cook. They are so good and the price was right!
Alice
Yay! Your freezer clean out/defrosting is done for a while. We did ours a few months ago and it's still in pretty good shape both for frost and organization. However, I understand about multiple people putting things away in different places. There are only two of us here and we still don't always put things away the same. However, I find it interesting to see how my husband's mind works differently than mine.
ReplyDeleteAnd the clean freezer award goes to .... Lili!
ReplyDeleteI cleaned out our freezer above our fridge a couple of weeks ago. I suddenly hit my "I'm SO over this!" point, and got to work. It tend to be where we stash little odds and ends, and it seems to become a mess quickly. I coompletely understand about different people using the same freezer. My biggest complaint is that someone (cough cough husband) doesn't typically label the frozen items, and I have no idea what I'm looking at after I find it. Ah well, if that's my biggest complaint, then my life isn't too hard.
Great job! I also do not enjoy defrosting a freezer and tend to put it off as long as I can.
ReplyDelete