No, it's not duct tape. I'm talking about the lowly freezer.
This is one of our two stand-alone freezer. Why is it so important? If you want to get the most economical price for meat produced by a local farmer, you're going to need to buy in some sort of bulk quantity, and in most cases, those bulk quantities are not going to fit snugly in the little baby freezer in your kitchen. For instance, we are selling our pork by the whole and half hog. A half hog is between 80-100 lbs, and even if you split that with a friend/friends (something we encourage), you still need a place to store your treasure trove of bacon, pork chops, roasts, hams, and ribs. Based on this handy page from Sugar Mountain Farm and backed up by our own experience, you can expect a full hog to take up about 4 cubic feet and a half hog (you guessed it) 2 cubic feet. Most "above the refrigerator" freezers have about 4 cubic feet of capacity, but if you factor in ice trays, racks, bulky cartons, etc, it's going to be hard to fit a box of meat in there. The freezer in the picture is probably about 10 cubic feet or so, and was picked up on craigslist for $50. Our other freezer I got free on craigslist. If you're not craiglist obsessed like me, you can buy one new (it will likely be more efficient as well (quick sidebar: chest style are more efficient than upright style because the cold air stays in when you open the lid versus sinking out onto the floor when you open the door of an upright. Keeping the freezer in a cool place like a basement is obviously better as well)). Even if you live in a studio apartment, you can probably find room for a freezer, though, as you can find them as small as 1 cubic feet (just enough for that quarter pig).
Aside from storing meat, we have found that a freezer is great for all sorts of food storage. We like to blanch, then freeze fresh veggies in freezer bags in the summer for use all winter long. We have also found that it's often easier to freeze than can. For instance, we bought two giant boxes of Roma tomatoes from Alvarez farm last year. We canned the first box, but ran out of time and energy when we go to the second. Rather than let the tomatoes rot, we threw the whole box in the freezer. It turned out to be a great plan, as we had access to ripe, local tomatoes all winter long for cooking. Next year, we'll probably freeze all our tomatoes and save ourselves a stressful weekend of canning. One word of advice: check your freezer on a daily basis. If it breaks down/fuse blows/apocalypse occurs, you'll be able to salvage the big investment you made in all that tasty meat. By the same token, a full freezer is going to stay cold longer during such an outage than a sparsely filled freezer, so you may consider adding some other material to bulk up your thermal mass.
So whether you go find a cheapo unit on craigslist or pony up for a new machine, I highly recommend investing in the omnivore's secret weapon!
Aside from storing meat, we have found that a freezer is great for all sorts of food storage. We like to blanch, then freeze fresh veggies in freezer bags in the summer for use all winter long. We have also found that it's often easier to freeze than can. For instance, we bought two giant boxes of Roma tomatoes from Alvarez farm last year. We canned the first box, but ran out of time and energy when we go to the second. Rather than let the tomatoes rot, we threw the whole box in the freezer. It turned out to be a great plan, as we had access to ripe, local tomatoes all winter long for cooking. Next year, we'll probably freeze all our tomatoes and save ourselves a stressful weekend of canning. One word of advice: check your freezer on a daily basis. If it breaks down/fuse blows/apocalypse occurs, you'll be able to salvage the big investment you made in all that tasty meat. By the same token, a full freezer is going to stay cold longer during such an outage than a sparsely filled freezer, so you may consider adding some other material to bulk up your thermal mass.
So whether you go find a cheapo unit on craigslist or pony up for a new machine, I highly recommend investing in the omnivore's secret weapon!
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