Helpful Tip Saturday!!!

Today’s Saturday’s Tips is all about suggestions and tips to get the most out of buying meat and chicken in bulk.

Buying in bulk can save money when you catch meats and chicken on sale. It can be a real chore when you get them home to properly freeze them. It’s very easy to just throw them in the freezer in the packages that they are sold. However, it’s not a very good idea to do that sort of thing.  After a period of time, the meats and chicken could get freezer burn.

Another possibility is that if you throw a huge tray of say, 20 porkchops into the freezer, what happens when you want to only use 4 or 5 of them? If you threw the whole tray into the freezer at the time you bought them, then when they thawed that’s just what you would have — 20 pork chops to cook.  It would be much simpler to divide the meat, pork, or chicken into smaller packages. This way you could divide them into the right serving sizes for your family.

What are some ways that you can freeze meats and chicken?

1. Cling wrap. I’m not a big fan of freezing in cling wrap. I’ve used it before and it still let in the freezer burn. Plus, it just seemed like I used a lot of cling wrap. If you’ve had experience with cling wrap, please comment on this one. Let us hear from you the pros and cons of using this method of freezing.
2. Aluminum foil . One thing about foil freezing is that you need to make sure that you have a label that has been either printed out or you use a permanent marker to write on it. Make sure that you tape the label down good to the foil. Once it’s put into the freezer, unlabeled then you won’t know what it is without opening it up.
3. Freezer bags. Freezer bags allow you to actually see what you are freezing. What about getting all the air out of the bag? There’s a product that is out now that I use. The Reynolds Handi-Vac is a mini vacuum food storage system. It’s really cool. You put the meat or whatever you want to vacuum seal into the bag and put the hand-held vacuum sealer onto the little blue dot and push the button. You’ll actually see the freezer bag being pulled down onto the contents. You can write directly on the freezer bags with a permanent marker.   Once you have removed all the air, the bags will lay almost flat and they are easier to store.

Picture Taken by JT Locke
for The Frugal Housewife

These are just a few ideas on freezing meats and chicken.  I hope that some of them have been helpful.  We would love to hear more helpful tips for packaging and freezing bulk purchases of meat and chicken.  Please leave us some comments. If you liked this post and would like to have updates sent directly to your email or RSS, don’t forget to sign up through the links at the top of the page.

Till next time,

JT Locke
The Frugal Housewife

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