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Hello, friend. Have you heard the good news?
Frozen food isn't terrible anymore. In fact, modern flash-freezing technologies can preserve
meat and some fruits & vegetables with virtually no loss of quality.
I would much rather have a piece of fish that was flash-frozen right off the boat — or
maybe even on the boat — as opposed to one that has been slowly decomposing on its thousand-mile
truck ride to my kitchen.
Or the more likely scenario these days is a piece of "fresh" fish that arrived at my
grocery store frozen, the folks behind the fish counter thawed it, and then it sat in
the case for a couple days waiting for me to buy it and take it home. Exactly how is
that fresher?
Nobody knows for sure, but the folks at the National Fisheries Institute told me they'd
guess 80% of seafood sold here in the United States was frozen at some point in the supply
chain. They don't think that's a bad thing, and neither do I. It's merely the case that
I'd rather buy it frozen and thaw it myself whenever possible.
If you're nervous about thawing stuff yourself or you just think it'll take too long, I'ma
show you a method that I think will change your mind. But first, flash freezing — why
is it good to freeze stuff really fast?
"When water turns to ice, it expands a little bit, and that can cause all kinds of damage
to the tissues of the plants or the animal that you're trying to freeze."
That's Dr. John Coupland, a food science professor at my my alma mater, Penn State.
"Another problem that happens is the water gets drawn from the plant or the animal into
these ice crystals, leaving the bits in-between kind of dried out. What you want to try to
do is to get this temperature down really low, really quickly. What that means is, you're
driving a process called crystal nucleation."
Ice crystal nucleation. The birth of ice crystals. This is a process we can see quite clearly
by making ice cream. Half a cup of milk, half a cup of cream, a third of a cup of sugar,
big splash of vanilla, stir that up.
And the final ingredient: cold. This is a block of dry ice — frozen carbon dioxide.
Surface temperature: -109 F, -78 C. You can buy it in grocery stores in the States, but
handle it with gloves or a towel. It can give you frost bite.
I'm just pulverizing it into snow — the finer the powder, the better. Then I'm gonna
stir it into my cream mixture one little spoonful at a time. This stuff is so cold that if you
were to stir in more than a spoonful, your ice cream would lock up hard like that instantaneously
and you wouldn't be able to stir it.
One spoonful at a time, and you'll see the mixture appear to boil. That's the dry ice
sublimating — that is, changing phase from a solid to a gas and leaving the ice cream.
When the bubbling calms down, go in with another spoonful. Be sure to work with dry ice in
a reasonably large, well-ventilated room. If you breath in too much of that sublimated
carbon dioxide, you're not gonna get enough oxygen.
After four or five spoonfuls, I've got this beautiful soft-serve ice cream. If you see
any big pieces of dry ice still swimming around, try to fish them out. Those could hurt you
if you bite into them. And stick the bowl into the freezer for about a half hour to
give any remaining dry ice in there the chance to sublimate and leave the bowl. The temperature
in there is cold enough to keep the ice cream frozen, but it's actually warm enough to allow
all the dry ice to sublimate.
The only hitch with this method is that we've literally carbonated the ice cream, so it's
a little fizzy, but that's still the smoothest ice cream I've ever made at home. Teeny, tiny
ice crystals. Compare that to this — the same exact cream mixture just thrown in the
freezer for a few hours. You can see the ginormous ice crystals. Why did this happen? Because
there was less crystal nucleation early in the freezing process.
Every ice crystal starts with a nucleus — a center — then the other water molecules
crowd around that center and the crystal grows. There's a finite amount of water in the food,
so the size of the crystals depends entirely on the number of nucleation sites across which
that water is being distributed.
If you start freezing at a relatively high freezing temperature, you're gonna start with
a just a handful of nucleation sites. Tons of water is gonna crowd around them and you'll
have huge crystals. If you start freezing at a lower temperature, you're gonna start
with a whole bunch of nucleation sites.
"So the same amount of ice present in lots of tiny crystals, rather than a few big ones,
which are gonna cause more damage to your plant tissue or your animal tissue."
Here's two apple slices — one I will bury in my dry ice snow before it goes in the freezer,
and the other I'll just put into the freezer. Here we are the next day: both solid as rocks,
slow-frozen apple slice is on the right. I'll thaw them out. They're both brown, due to
enzymatic reactions that I could have prevented with acid, but the flash-frozen apple slice
still has the flavor and texture of a fresh apple. The slow-frozen slice is soft and gummy.
"If these big, big slow-growing crystals form, they're just big and spiky. They could start
to damage cells. They could chew up the plant or the animal tissue in a way that's gonna
make the quality very poor. The idea is that the initial freezing process should be as
fast and as aggressive as possible, then maybe you could store at slightly less-cold temperatures."
And we can see that in action here at Rocking Chair Ranch. This is an organic, grass-fed
beef producer outside where I live in Macon, Georgia. The owner, Joseph Egloff, just finished
building his own processing plant here. This is where the animals are slaughtered, the
carcasses get hung on the rails up above, then they slide into this very cold room called
a "pre-chiller."
Here's where they hang the sides, potentially for weeks for a dry-aged product.
In here, they break the sides down into individual cuts, they vacuum-seal the cuts in plastic,
and the cuts go to this blast freezer. Check out the convection fans blasting crazy cold
air across the product.
Because Joseph is freezing small little cuts instead of whole sides or sections of beef,
he's able to freeze them crazy fast, hence lots of ice nucleation sites, hence lots of
tiny ice crystals that won't puncture cell walls.
"We can take things down from 40 degrees down to -10 in a matter of minutes, where it used
to be it took hours."
It is increasingly common for small little boutique producers like Rocking Chair Ranch
to deal exclusively in frozen product. If you want to deal in unfrozen product, you
simply have to turn a much larger volume of business in order to sell it fast enough to
make sure that you're selling fresh stuff.
If you think all the plastic wrapping is wasteful, well consider that the product in your grocery
store's butcher case probably came to them vacuum packed as well. They simply unwrapped
it, broke it down into smaller cuts and maybe wrapped it up in plastic again for you to
take it home.
Flash freezing has particular benefits with fish — for example, small fish, like shrimp.
These are generally frozen via a process known as IQF.
"IQF stands for individually quick-frozen."
This is Tori Stivers, a seafood specialist at the University of Georgia's Marine Extension,
which works with commercial fishers around where I live.
"Of course, berries can be done that way as well, so that's why you could pull out a few
at a time. So they usually have a little bit of glaze around it, so it doesn't stick together,
but that's a lot more convenient than buying a 5-pound block of shrimp frozen together
and trying to have to..."
...chisel them out one at a time, right? These are techniques that were pioneered about a
hundred years ago by an American inventor named Clarence Birdseye. To this day, it works
best on small little bits of vegetable, especially peas. To individually quick freeze something
small, you might lay out all the bits on some kind of conveyer belt and blast them with
something — these days it could be liquid nitrogen.
"It's called cryogenic freezing, where we use liquid nitrogen to make very, very cold
temperatures to freeze things effectively instantaneously. That's about the best quality
you can get with frozen foods."
There's another particular benefit freezing when it comes to seafood, and that is safety.
Broadly-speaking, the bit safety concern with fish and shellfish is parasites.
"So parasites are the worms that are naturally occurring in some species of fish, and so
if you freeze them for some certain prescribed amount of time at a certain temperature, it
will kill the worm, it will kill the parasite. You may still physically see it, but if the
parasite is dead, it's not gonna cause that parasitic infection."
And for that reason, federal regulations here in the United States say that most fish sold
for sushi has to be frozen for some combination of time and temperature to kill parasites.
"Now a lot of sushi or sashimi connoisseurs will say that destroys the texture, but better
that than having an intestinal parasite."
And if you want my opinion, I think that said connoisseurs are probably just making it up,
assuming we're talking about properly flash-frozen fish.
All of which invites the question: If I invite more frozen product into my kitchen, how do
I thaw it? Well, when it comes to things like little bits of frozen vegetable, I say don't!
They can go straight into the pot, still frozen solid. They'll melt in seconds. But what about
something bigger, like fish fillet?
"So the safest way to thaw is in the refrigerator, or if you're talking about doing something
really quickly, you can run it under cool running water."
And that is the technique that really opened up the world of frozen meat to me. Stuff thaws
great in the refrigerator, but it takes a long time. It might take overnight, for something
like a fish fillet. For something bigger, it's gonna take days, potentially.
The water method is so much faster. I have a whole video about this — it's linked in
the description. The short version is water is way more dense than air, so that's way
more relatively warm molecules coming into contact with your food and transferring in
their heat. And because water is so effective at this, the water just doesn't have to be
warm. It's just cool water from the tap.
By the time its heat transfers to the food, the water temperature probably goes below
the bacterial danger zone, and even if it doesn't, it doesn't really matter, because
this method works so quickly. There just isn't enough time for bacteria to grow, especially
if you leave the water running.
For something small, like shrimp, I don't bother leaving the water running, because
they thaw in like 10 minutes no matter what. For this really big hanger steak that I cooked
in my Steak 201 video, I think that it helped to leave the water trickling, to keep it moving
— to keep keep a fresh supply of water molecules circulating around the food. This huge piece
of meat thawed in 40 minutes.
Now, when I've talked about this method before, people have raised concerns about water waste.
And I think if you live in a place where fresh water is scarce, that's a legitimate concern.
But I don't worry about it, and I'll tell you why.
First of all, fresh water is not scarce where I live. Second of all, trickling water just
doesn't add up to that much. I did a little experiment using that tape as a marker. This
thawing procedure used about six gallons of water total. Two of those were in the bowl,
therefore the extra trickle added up four. With a piece of meat this big and thick, I
would have had to change the water in the bowl once or twice anyway to get it thawed,
which would have worked out to six gallons of water, so it's a wash. And speaking of
washing, six gallons is what a typical dishwasher cycle consumes. A typical shower in the United
States consumes about 17 gallons, and it takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce a single
pound of beef, ranch to freezer. So, come on, let's keep things in perspective.
There's lots of ways to thaw stuff, but thawing under running cold is, in my opinion, simply
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Now go chill.
Oh hey, you're still here. Well, that's good, because I require your assistance. I'm working
on a video about washing meat — whether you should wash raw meat before you cook it.
This is a surprisingly fraught scientific and cultural issue. I went looking for some
research about global practices on this — things that people do differently from place to place,
and I found absolutely nothing, so I'm doing it myself.
I'm working with some public health researchers over at Middle Georgia State University, and
we put together a survey. I would love it if you would take it. It takes about 10 minutes,
it just asks you some questions about what you do in the kitchen vis-a-vis washing meat,
and other kind of basic food safety things. And it would be great if you could take it,
and if you could get all of your friends and family to take it, especially if you live
in places that are not here, though even if live here, it's be great if you could take
it. It'll be up for a couple weeks as of the posting of this video, and then the results
from that will go into a video on this topic. The link for that survey is in the description.
Oh, and just to provide a little incentive, if you take this survey, I will enter your
name into a drawing, and the winner of that drawing will get to do an episode of "Ask
Adam" with me. Instead of Lauren asking the questions, you'll be the one asking the questions,
and that means that you could sneak in some of your own. So if that sweetens the deal
for you, all the better.