The freezer might be my best friend in the kitchen. I freeze beans, brown rice and cooked leafy greens for quick, healthy meals. I freeze bananas. I freeze calzones. I even freeze whole unbaked pies. All this freezing saves a lot of time and money, but my poor freezer is stuffed — and there's still more I want to freeze! That's why, even though I live in an apartment, I'm seriously considering buying a chest freezer.
I live in an urban apartment with no garage or basement, which I thought made owning an extra freezer an impossibility, without even factoring in the extra cost of buying it and paying for the electricity to run it. But compact (5 cubic feet), energy-efficient chest freezers are available, and most cost less than $300, which is equivalent to about ten takeout orders from the local Thai place. A freezer loaded with meals to heat up on nights when I'm too exhausted to cook will pay for itself quickly.
Chest freezers are more energy-efficient than upright versions, and can keep food frozen longer if the power goes out. Manual-defrost models are cheaper and use less energy, but require the occasional defrosting, which can be inconvenient. The only other drawback is that chest freezers are more difficult to organize, as the items of the bottom can be hard to get to when the freezer is full.
For me, the economy and convenience of being able to make food in bulk and freeze it for busy nights outweighs the minor maintenance cost of a chest freezer and the effort of having to occasionally defrost it. All I need to do now is take a few measurements to make sure I can fit a freezer in the corner I have in mind.
More On Chest Freezers
• Help! Should I Buy a Chest or Upright Freezer?
• You Put A Chest Freezer Where?!
Do you have an extra freezer? Do you have any advice for those thinking about buying one?
Related: 5 Enviably Well-Organized Freezers
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We bought one when we used to feed our dogs a raw diet and had many pounds of meat on hand. More recently it's been very useful after pig roasts for all of the leftovers. I think that if you have the space, the convenience they offer is well worth the price.
I would love to have one but in the one room that has no carpet -- the laundry room -- there are no outlets.
I had a 5 cubic foot chest freezer when I lived in an apartment. I kept it in the garage, laundry room and in one apartment, the closet. I loved it. I still have it. It's at least 10 years old and lives in the garage of my house now right outside of the kitchen door.
I have one in my small townhouse. It's actually in my dining room, but I keep a cloth over it and use it as a "buffet" a lot of the time. It has made a huge difference in my grocery budget and my eating out budget. I can buy things in bulk, preprepare crock pot meals, and make huge batches of soup/stew/beans to keep on hand.
We managed to wrangle little chest freezer for free from my parents and WE LOVE IT! I really has allowed us to stock up on meats when they are on sale. We now use the fridge freezer for "reach in and grab it" type things and it's great!
Its not my favorite LOOK in the kitchen but it's so darn useful that we wonder how we did with out it. I wrote about it here: http://1500sqft.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/another-kitchen-mini-reorganization/
We had to give our chest freezer (scored for $50 basically brand new on craigslist in SF bay area) to a family member when we moved from florida to DC -- our building doesn't allow them. I wish every week that I still had it. Now that we're likely to be moving soon, I am pretty despondent over the loss of that sweet deal, although happy that my cousin is getting great use out of it! I used to do a tremendous amount of freezer cooking but we don't have the room for it.
p.s. My solution, although it isn't quite the same, is to batch cook on weekends and store everything in our very cold fridge. This allows me to prepare larger batches because I don't have the time to cook every day. But it means a lot more repetition :(
I know a chest freezer is more energy efficient, but if you're really tight for space, a small upright deep freezer is great because you can use the top of it as a surface. We lived in a small apartment when I had a baby, and I bought the freezer so that we could prepare more frozen meals, and also have a place to store breastmilk! We put our microwave on top of it, so it allowed us to get the microwave off the counter and score some extra counter space. You could also buy a nice butcher-block cutting board to put on top of it to use it as an extra counter-top space.
I just purchased one last weekend. I'm dreaming of all baking I can now do and freeze. Christmas cookies!
We keep a fairly big chest freezer in our spare bedroom. Before that it lived in my dining room, which was actually an art room. I must have a good one, because it's never made a mess on the carpets at all. I didn't even know you were supposed to worry about it.
It's amazing. When I cook burritos? I make two trays of them, and freeze the rest, same with calzones. I make huge batches of soups. I can buy meat at costco, portion it out, and freeze.
There's only two of us, but I am sick an awful lot with my disease, so the freezer lets me make meals when I am well, and have "fast food" when I am sick.
I have a 7 cu. ft. chest freezer in my 1 bedroom apartment. It's technically in the living room, but it's right off the entrance to the kitchen and I insisted on getting a black one so it wouldn't be an eye sore. I mostly use it for sides of beef and pork, but I'd love to start stocking freezer meals in there as well (once I clear out enough meat to make room!) I agree that it's tough to keep track of what's down at the bottom, though...just this morning I was searching for a package of sausage to defrost for dinner tonight, but I had to give up so I wouldn't be late!
RE: freezer organization, I recommend cardboard boxes. Even beer cases work! I put all of one kind of thing in one box ("made food", bread/starch, beef, etc), and then put a list on the top of the freezer of the box contents. This has helped me enormously! For my parent's much larger freezer, they use milk crates.
I've never understood why you can't by a combo fridge/freezer where the freezer half is bigger than the fridge half, or even as big. Maybe it's because I live alone, but I definitely could use more freezer space than fridge space. My fridge is always half empty and my freezer is always jam-packed.
Next we need a post about how to dress up a chest freezer so it doesn't look like a chest freezer. Maybe if you could find or make a large, removable tray to cover the top, you could use it as a buffet more easily. Then you could just pick up one big tray instead of several small items.
We have a mid-size upright freezer in our garage and it's absolutely stuffed right now with fruit and veggies and chickens from the garden and CSA. I found plastic bins that will fit two per shelf and it has really helped, especially with the whole chickens.
We have an upright and it is the best thing ever.
I opted for an upright freezer, because, I am disabled and only have the use of one arm. I really don't have the stamina to rudder around in a chest. I cook for one and find the freezer indipensable making additional servings when I have the energy.
I have also found the Foodsaver indispensable for freezer portions and keeping away freezer burn when I buy in quantity.
reading this makes me feel like i'm doing something wrong. frozen leftovers are such a letdown. never a choice i would make above fresh cooking.
maybe its because we don't eat freezer friendly dishes, but we only reluctantly freeze food so it doesn't go to waste. i would much prefer not to have leftovers at all. also, we only use ice cubes when we have guests over.
really, the most important items in my freezer are liquor and ice cream. and i've got plenty of room for those. lol
Frozen soups are my favorite winter time lunch. For one thing, they don't need refrigeration. I can put a frozen soup container in my lightly insulated lunch bag on my way out the door and its still mostly frozen at noon. And I think they taste as good as when they are fresh, as long as I don't do anything with a cream base or potatoes. Kale and white bean, chicken tortilla, lentil and sausage ... All work really well.
I love having a freezer, even moreso after we swapped from a chest to an upright. It's great for storing dog food, too, if you package the kibble in ziplock bags (cheaper in larger volume, but a smallish dog doesn't eat like a Great Dane).
Yup, we've got a chest freezer in our apartment, originally bought when we converted our dogs to raw food. I don't have many cabinets in the kitchen, so there's actually room for it in there. I have it closer to my stove than I'd like, but it makes a great place to rest things briefly when cooking. I often have a kitchen towel thrown over it and use it as a work space.
I have it organized on the inside using milk crates. I also buy containers that stack well and fit the dimensions of the freezer nicely. I try to keep a running inventory of what's in there so nothing gets lost in the abyss.
oh man. I never even realized that I could get a small freezer! This post just made my day. I've been dreaming of the day we could have one :)
I highly recommend springing for a chest freezer even if you live in an apartment. I moved to Europe a few years ago and lamented the size of the fridge and freezer. We found a small chest freezer for sale on the Dutch version of Craigslist for 30 euro and went for it. It's been a great investment! I also took the time to make an Evernote list on our shared food notebook called "What's in the Freezer?" It's helpful for me and my boyfriend to see what's there when planning meals. When I made the list I realized I had 4 little containers of pine nuts floating around in there - I kept buying them and forgetting I had them.
I have a small upright freezer and I love it. I use it to store homemade chicken stock and tomato sauce, extra bread and rolls, ice cream, etc. We considered a chest freezer, but uprights are much easier to see into and organize if you're vertically-challenged, like I am. :-)