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Chest freezers turn out to be useful when Costco has a sale on prime cuts of meat, or when you’ve got a big household that likes to tear by means of extra meals than a regular fridge can inventory. No matter your purpose for a chest freezer, there may be one factor individuals universally wrestle with: hold it organized.
Since a chest freezer is actually a deep chest, it will probably simply turn into cluttered as you purchase extra meals. This makes it tough to get to meals saved on the underside and hold monitor of what you have already got in inventory. Nevertheless, with intelligent group, these points might be solved.
Right here’s methods to manage your chest freezer so it stops wanting like a untamed maze of meals. Observe these easy steps and also you’ll have a neater time preserving monitor of what you’ve gotten in inventory.
Very similar to the way you manage your closet, you want to categorize your meals. Take every part out of the chest freezer and divide it into piles: meats, soups, breads, frozen dinners, sauces, and so forth. When you have a ton of a specific class, you may create subcategories like “hen,” “beef,” and “fish.” Not solely will this allow you to hold inventory of the objects you’ve gotten, however it’s going to additionally allow you to see what sorts of storage bins or racks you want relying on the quantity in every class.
Top off on freezer bins.
Moderately than having unfastened baggage cluttering your freezer, put money into freezer bins which can be simple to choose up and transfer round. Measure your freezer to get its dimensions, after which look on-line for bins that match the depth of the chest. You possibly can’t go incorrect with the kind of bin you select — they are often strong plastic, wire farmhouse bins, or outdated shifting packing containers. You may also search your home and see when you’ve got any bins at the moment not in use. For a budget-conscious various, see what collection of plastic bins your native greenback retailer has.
You’ll want to select bins which can be proportional to your classes. When you have a big provide of frozen bread or baked items, select a bin that’s sufficiently big to maintain every part in a single place. However when you’ve got a small quantity of pre-chopped greens, a small bin will do.
Think about decanting the meals into plastic baggage.
When you have cumbersome meats, giant quantities of frozen veggies, or tubs of frozen soups, think about transferring them from bulkier packing containers to freezer baggage that may be neatly stacked. This may imply having to separate one single merchandise right into a collection of smaller baggage, however the objective is to make the luggage as flat as potential in order that they’re simpler to rearrange. Should you do that, ensure to obviously label every bag with its serving dimension (if relevant) and expiration date. Stack the objects with the soonest expiration date on the high of the bin so you utilize them first.
Resolve what you utilize probably the most.
Whether or not it’s pre-cut greens for cooking or soups for fast lunches, resolve what you utilize probably the most in your freezer and put these classes to the facet. You need to ensure these bins are on the very high of the chest, so that you’re not hauling out heavy packing containers to get to one thing you utilize day by day. As a substitute, you need objects you not often use or have stockpiled for a wet day on the backside of the chest and the objects you utilize often on the high.
Stack your bins in alternating instructions in order that they’re simple to maneuver round. For instance, put your least-used and bulkier objects on the underside of the chest. Relying on the scale of the freezer, you may match anyplace from two to 5 bins there. If these bins had been organized horizontally, layer the subsequent bins vertically. Maintain going till you attain the highest layer, which needs to be your most-used objects. When you want to get one thing deeper down into the chest, you may merely take away these bins, and get to the layer you want with out rooting round heavy baggage and packing containers.
Think about vacuum sealing to make extra space.
When you have a whole lot of surplus meals however don’t have room for an even bigger freezer, make your provide extra manageable by vacuum-sealing the meals. This may compress any pointless area, permitting you to prepare extra baggage in a bin than you often would be capable to match. To take action, you may both get a vacuum sealer machine that can do the be just right for you, or you may manually accomplish that with a zip-top freezer bag and a bowl of water.
Prepare your meals flat within the bag, press out as a lot air as you may, and zip the seal closed nearly to the tip. Holding the bag by the open nook, slowly decrease it into the water, smoothing out any large air bubbles that may seem. Maintain reducing it till you attain the nook, after which zip it closed. Try to be left with an air-tight seal.
Maintain a paper stock on the chest.
Typically it’s onerous to maintain monitor of what’s in your freezer, irrespective of how ruthlessly you manage. To make sure you don’t neglect about that reduce of meat on the very backside of the chest or use the final soup container with out figuring out, hold a paper stock taped to the skin of the equipment. In every line, embrace the meals merchandise, its bundle or container dimension, and what number of of these packages you’ve gotten. This may warn you when you’re operating low on one thing (you can then snap up throughout a sale!) or remind you you’ve gotten that one obscure ingredient you fully forgot about. Think about investing in a magnetic pen you may connect to the chest so you may simply tick off your stock as you seize issues.
