Before DF was in my life, there was another: Chester. Cool and calm, he collected great deals for me: manager’s-special meats, gleaned blackberries, bread from the bakery outlet, and on-sale veggies, flour and butter.
Chester was – and is! – a 5.5-cubic foot chest freezer. Right now he’s crammed mostly with on-sale meats; there’s room, because we finished up last year’s raspberries. Recently we’ve found some pretty astounding prices on late-date carnivore bait: ground beef for a dollar a pound, a three-pack of bratwurst for about 68 cents a pound and shank-end hams at 49 cents a pound.
About that last: It is not a typo. I can’t remember when I’ve seen ham at a price that low. Maybe…Never? And thanks to Chester, we were able to get three of them.
You don’t have to be an omnivore to appreciate a freezer, though. When frozen vegetables are available at fire-sale prices, you can get six or seven (or more) bags instead of being limited to one or two. Vegetarian/vegan frozen foods are increasingly varied in scope, so you don’t have to do everything from scratch. (Although my vegetarian sister makes and freezes a big batch of refried beans on the regular.)
And no, the electric bill hasn’t gone up noticeably. (At the time of purchase, I estimated the cost at 78 cents per month.) And even if today’s freezers weren’t super-energy-efficient, I would still want one. Here’s why.
Having more storage space lets us take advantage of good deals vs. being limited to one or two items. The freezer over the fridge does what it can, but it has its limits.
So does Chester. Some days I wish I’d bought a bigger appliance. But it’s amazing how much we can get in there. Wheedling all that stuff into place is like an icy Tetris game, but it’s worth it. Soooo worth it.
Amy D. had a freezer
Don’t believe me? Maybe you’ll believe the grande dame of frugality, Amy Dacyczyn. In her 1995 “The Tightwad Gazette II,” she said that even single people should own freezers. After all, it saves you money in several ways:
As noted, you can take advantage of the best deals.
You can double your favorite recipes and freeze half of the result. Having lots of meals stashed means you’re less likely to order takeout.
Not interested in batch cooking? Try “engineering” leftovers instead. Before you serve dinner, set aside one portion to be frozen. Now you have a brown-bag lunch ready to go, or a ready-to-heat meal on a night when you’re too tired to cook.
Freezers make it easier to become a frugalvore.
If someone offers you food, you’ll have a place to store it. That could be produce from your avid-gardener neighbor, fish or meat from acquaintances who collect their protein from the big outdoor supermarket, or a great find from your Buy Nothing Facebook group (last week I picked up five quarts of yogurt, which I froze for smoothies).
If your own garden succeeds, ditto: You have a place to put it all.
Stocking up means you shop less often, which saves you time and gas money. Additionally, the less often you’re in the store the less likely you’ll succumb to those freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies or that gorgeous (but pricey) out-of-season produce.
Things we’ve frozen
Moose
Apple-pie filling made with apples from our own trees
Halibut
Raspberries – lots of them
Ducks
All sorts of supermarket meat
Overripe bananas, cut into slices (for smoothies)
Salmon
Boiling bag soup stock
Chopped celery from our garden (the leaves get dehydrated)
Milk
Red or yellow peppers from the “ugly produce” shelf, which cost about 30 cents apiece; chopped and frozen, they can be added to whatever we’re cooking
Peas from our garden
Whitefish
Butter (last week it was $1.97 a pound, limit two; we got two)
Homemade turkey pies, made with on-sale turkey that we buy and pressure-can
On-sale ice cream
Mosquitoes (a half-cup of them, from our mosquito magnet – DF wanted to make sure they were really dead before he tossed them into the compost)
Sea lion (that was DF, years ago; he says it’s the one kind of meat he could never make taste good)
A few pro tips
Your freezer works best when it’s full. If it’s mostly empty, put in some mostly-full milk jugs full of water (leave room for the water to expand). As you buy items, you can remove the milk jugs.
Don’t put hot or room-temperature foods into the freezer; this makes it work harder Instead, freeze them in the little freezer atop your fridge and once you have a bunch of frozen items, move them all into the chest freezer at the same time. Every time you open the freezer, cold air escapes and warm air infiltrates. Since mine is a manual-defrost freezer, the less often I open it the less often I’ll have to defrost. (And does anyone else remember a parent yelling, “Close the freezer door!” when they lingered overlong on the Popsicle selection?)
Keep an inventory. Every time you add things, add them to the list; every time you take something out, amend the inventory. Again, the appliance has to work harder if you stare into the open freezer, wondering what you might cook that day.
When flour goes on sale, stock up. I used to buy it around the holidays, when I’d see 88-cent bags, and put it in the freezer in plastic bags. Cook’s Illustrated notes that whole-grain flours particularly benefit from this kind of storage; because they have more fat in them, they could go rancid relatively fast in your pantry. (Bring them to room temperature before baking.)
To recap: Freezers are a friend to frugalists. With food prices rising so quickly, consider the value of being able to stock up on the best deals you can find. Would you rather pay almost five bucks a pound for ground beef, or a dollar?
When you find a good deal at the bakery outlet, won’t it feel good to know you’ve got three months’ worth of multigrain bread on hand? And if your neighbor with the boat offers you five pounds of flounder fillets, you’ll have a place to put it all. You can just say “no” to sea lion, however.
Related reading:
- The low-maintenance preppers
- Don’t throw it out until you’ve smelled it
- 12 ways to save money on groceries
A thousand amens to this. I have an extra freezer/fridge unit. A lot of sale and BOGOS go in there. It’s rescued everything from dinner to last minute baking projects.
So, so true! In fact, i HAVE a small chest freezer. But how the heck do you Tetris it so your strawberries aren’t buried by the cheap meat and extra rolls? Would love a how-to on your method of stacking things efficiently!
Use shopping bags to separate things. It works well since the bags are not rigid. I use plastic bins in my upright freezer to separate things so I can find them later.
What kind of shopping bags? The reusable pretend fabric or heavy duty plastic ones that cost about $1?
We’re fairly higgledy-piggledy, i.e., we fill every available space. So when we open the freezer to get something, we get LOTS of somethings and put them in the freezer over the fridge.
Opening it every time we needed a pound of butter or some raspberries wouldn’t make sense. Thus we’ll take out three or four pounds of butter and four or five bags of berries, plus whatever meat we feel like cooking in the next couple of weeks.
The inventory is essential, too. Looking at it reminds us what’s still in there, so we’ll plan meals based on that.
I Tetris mine by using square or rectangular containers for the most part. Easier to stack and fit. Meat was on the right, veg/fruit on the left, miscellaneous in the middle. I have since invested in a full freezer and its a joy. Still Tetris stacked but now on shelves.
We have a deep freezer and where able to stock it well and spent less time shopping during the pandemic because we knew we had food in the freezer. Just another plus that helped us save money and stay safe.
Good point! We had that as well, and went to the supermarket only for fresh stuff like eggs and produce — only once every couple of weeks.
We did the same we feel very lucky indeed.
Definitely agree! We have a side by side refrigerator which came with the house we bought, works fine no need to replace now but the freezer area isn’t what we were used to so we purchased an older top freezer refrigerator for our garage and it comes in so handy. We usually stock up on bread, cheese and butter at the store and it all freezes quite well along with meats and such.
When I was managing an apartment building in Seattle, one of the things I often did was empty the lobby trashcan. A cleaning service came weekly, but this can was small and often overflowed with junk mail (grrrr — I recycled it) and soda cans.
One week the nearby bread outlet sent us all “grand reopening!” flyers that included, among other things, coupons for one free loaf of bread. Most of my neighbors threw theirs into the trash. I got a LOT of bread over the next few weeks, and stashed it in the freezer. Cheap sandwiches for the win!
These days we keep only a loaf or two at a time in the freezer. But when there’s a really good deal at the bread outlet, such as 99-cent Crustini rolls, we’ll stock up.
I love my chest freezer. It’s kind of like having an insurance policy. If I’m ever short of cash, I can eat from the freezer for weeks. We go through the freezer periodically and try to eat the food down so that it doesn’t get too old. It’s a financial bonus when we do that because we are not going to the store. It’s also nice to have a stack of frozen pizzas ready to go for those nights that nobody wants to cook. There are a few things I don’t like thawed, but most are okay. My mom used to freeze milk when it was buy one get one free, and it was always gross when she thawed it. I used to hate thawed bread, but I found out a tip for freezing it – put a sheet of paper towel in the bag, then freeze it. I can’t imagine eating sea lion, and I have a feeling it would take more than one box of baking soda to get rid of the fishy smell.
We grew up eating frozen-then-thawed bread, so I don’t notice a difference. Then again, almost all my sandwiches start with putting two slices of multigrain into the toaster oven; pretty sure that toasting would remove any off-flavor that I might otherwise detect.
And yeah, eating down the freezer is a routine with us as well. We don’t want any UFOs (unidentified frozen objects) haunting us later.
We are past needing to earn or save any more money, but we still enjoy the utility of having a chest freezer. With the kids gone the two of us are light eaters and a lot would go to waste if we couldn’t freeze extra food. Plus I catch way too many fish to eat in the spring and fall, the freezer let’s us have fish year round. And if a snow storm shuts the roads down we can go for weeks on what’s in there. When we had three teenagers at home we had two chest freezers!
We’re with Steveark, a comfortable retirement after a lifetime of frugality, but when Covid hit, who the heck wanted to go to the grocery store? I’m embarrassed to admit that it was nine months into the pandemic before I realized that I would love a small chest freezer JUST to keep store trips down, forever. Husband eats a lot of bread and the side by side freezer only held so much. We are happy campers now.
Apparently there was a run on freezers during the pandemic and they were hard to find. Glad I already had mine.
In fact, mine is nine years old now. Hoping that it lasts for-evah.
Next to a small chest freezer, the best investment I ever made was a freezer alarm that beeps incessantly if the temperature falls. That was how—just last month!–we realized someone had kicked the plug out of the wall and no one noticed. That $15 item saved us hundreds that we would have lost in frozen food had it all thawed. I bought it after a friend did not notice that her two upright freezers had somehow shorted out—not only was everything thawed to the point of being warm, but it had started to rot so lots of extra work involved. She has a large family and figures she lost over $1,000 in meat and fish…
Arrrggggghhhhh! What a loss. I would have been heartbroken by the wasting of so much food.
My dad had one of those meters. Since their freezer was in the basement, he could check the meter from upstairs (wi-fi, I think) and save a lot of up-and-downs.
When the pandemic hit, I waited 4 months to get a small 4 ft upright freezer for myself and my dog -and I was lucky to get it! I have noticed that there are so many freezers going cheap now on Craigslist, FaceBook Marketplace, etc etc – which makes me wonder if anybody learned anything from this whole experience? If you don’t have one, now is the time to get a bargain! I will never be without a freezer again, I learned my lesson!
I don’t think we learned anything, either. Why would you not want to keep getting the best deals possible instead of paying retail? Oh, well. Frugal readers, you should take advantage of what Stephanie has said and steart checking Facebook Marketplace et al.
I have childhood memories of electrical outages. First my parents were “do NOT open the freezer “and then they figured we hit the point of no return. They sent us from door to door trying to find homes for thawing food.
Now my strategy is I have the freezer of the combo unit at work as a backup. I keep about a half dozen bottles of frozen water there. If I need to pick up groceries on the way home a grab one. Other than that it is free except for a couple frozen dinners that no one claims.