Hi! While unfreezing my ice box I put various groceries on the porch, as it is around -5°C at the moment. When I checked the packaging, I noticed that the date the food was supposed to be consumed by, varied widely, depending on the temperature. From 3 days (-5°C) to around a year (-15°C). How does it make that big of a difference? Is the water not equally frozen at both temperature points?
In: 4
If you slowly freeze something, ice crystals form very slowly in it, causing the crystals to grow and poke little holes in the structure of the food. This happens on a cellular level. You can particularly notice this in something leafy like lettuce, after thawing the leaf becomes very floppy and soft.
If you quickly freeze something, the ice crystals don’t get to grow so much, so the ice crystals can’t damage the structure of the food, so it prezerved it better.
The colder the freezer, the faster things freeze.
Once the food has been frozen, storing it at -15 or -5 won’t make much of a difference.
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