clarified butter sold commercially 293

Dee Randall

Dee Dee,

What newsgroup are you reading? I only ask because I was going to trim the cross-posts, but then I thought that might cut you out. Dan and I are on ne.food.

I've used but not owned horizontal chest freezers. I don't know if modern ones are self-defrosting. However, when I purchased a vertical freezer I had the choice of defrosting and non-defrosting. When I looked at the long-term energy costs and the problem of drying out food stored for long periods, I went with the non-defrosting. It was a chore to deice it manually once or twice a year, but if I had something more unpleasant that I wanted to procrastinate about (repairing the tiller or mucking out the spring box, for example), it was a good way to kill a couple of hours.

Here are the tradeoffs between chest freezers and uprights:

The chest freezer doesn't spill cold air into the room when you open it. So, in theory anyway, it's more energy-efficient. However, against that advantage, you have a number of disadvantages. First, there's your back. Second, there's all the digging to the bottom to remember what's buried down there. Third, it's a good place to put food that's already frozen, but it's not very good at freezing warm food quickly.

With the upright, you do spill cold air every time you open the door (and there's a hazard that, if you overfill it or something slides down and forward, the door will stand slightly ajar for quite a while before you notice--hence the advisability of using the door lock that's provided. On the plus side, several or all of the wire shelves have refrigerant coils under them. So you can actively freeze stuff quickly (important if you're freezing veggies from the garden, not so important if you buy your food already frozen). The shelves also make it fairly easy to organize stuff and see what you've got. Finally, it takes a lot less floor space than a chest freezer of similar capacity.

In the end, you pays yer money and you takes yer cherce; but I prefer the upright design.

As for defrosting, Dan, you don't have to eat all the food in order to defrost it. Just move the stuff out into a bunch of cardboard boxes while you work and return it when you're done. Stuff doesn't thaw instantly; and a little softening around the edges isn't going to affect the quality significantly, if at all, as long as the food doesn't completely thaw to above 40 F.