It’s Monday night, and you just got home.
You’re too exhausted to actually cook a decent meal, so you reach into the freezer
and pull out a frozen dinner from the back.
Your stomach rumbles.
You open the box and pull out your lasagna and …
Noooo!
Freezer burn.
Everything’s covered in a thick layer of stale-smelling ice crystals, and you know
your dinner is ruined.
It’s a common thing.
Any food you leave in the freezer too long is eventually going to end up about as appealing
as a dead Tauntaun on Hoth.
Why, you ask?
Because it’s drying up.
See, there are frozen water molecules in your steak, ice cream, or bag of corn.
And over time, in the dry air of your freezer, some of those molecules tend to sublimate
-- in other words, they go directly from solid ice to water vapor.
You may have noticed this happening to ice cubes, too -- it’s why they slowly shrink
in their trays when you could’ve sworn you filled them up all the way.
The molecules will often then re-freeze somewhere else, like on the package or as part of the
gigantic frost wall that’s threatening to slowly take over your entire freezer.
But either way, your food isn’t getting its moisture back -- it ends up dehydrated
and discolored, not to mention puckered and gray and generally unappetizing.
You can help delay freezer burn by double-wrapping foods and sealing them in air-tight containers
to reduce their exposure to air, but if you leave food in your freezer long enough, eventually
sublimation is going to ruin your dinner plans.
The good news -- if you can call it that -- is that frozen foods don’t decay, so freezer-burned
food is still generally safe to eat.
I’m just not sure why you’d want to.
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