Health
Frost Bites
It's fast and it's foolproof—here's how to take advantage of the most guy-friendly tool for better eating: Your freezer
By Timothy Gower; Photographs by John Manno
By now, you've pretty much mastered the fridge stare-down: Open the refrigerator door, gaze inside, and wonder what there is to eat. Then you grab a beer, swing the door shut, and reach for the pizza coupon stuck on the front.
It's time to take it to the next level: staring into your freezer.
Too many men's freezers resemble Superman's Fortress of Solitude: essentially empty, with a mound of fused ice and perhaps the glittering tower of a vodka bottle set against an expanse of permafrost. That's too bad, because the freezer is the unsung—and, too often, underused—hero of any kitchen.
Your freezer should already contain bags and bags of frozen fruit for those smoothies we keep telling you to make. Here are six more rules for coming into the cold.
Freezer Rule #1
Fresher isn't always better or tastier.
Food snobs would rather lop off their tongues with a drop-forged Wüsthof chef's knife than admit this bracing truth: Sometimes frozen produce tastes better than fresh—especially when it's a vegetable that's out of season. The main reason: Food-freezing technology has come a long way, says Douglas Archer, PhD, a professor of food science at the University of Florida.
Food-processing companies have greatly refined the technique introduced in 1924 by Clarence Birdseye (who was posthumously inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005, along with the inventors of Valium and the electric guitar). Birdseye's brainstorm, which he copied from Eskimos he observed while working in Labrador, was that quickly freezing food prevents the formation of the large ice crystals that damage the cells in fruits and vegetables.
The ideal temperature for storing food is 0°F. Scientists at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) figured that out more than half a century ago. Now we know that peas freeze best when lowered from room temp to 0° in three or four minutes, while diced carrots take six minutes and french fries require up to 12 minutes. So-called time-temperature tolerance studies have helped transform frozen foods from barely palatable mush to convincing stand-ins for fresh foods.
One big reason: Food processors pick fruits and vegetables at their peak of ripeness, because the produce doesn't have to be shipped across the country and then sit in a supermarket. After picking, the produce is briefly blanched in hot water, which destroys bacteria and enzymes that cause food to discolor and lose texture. Then foods are quickly frozen, which locks them in a state of suspended animation, kind of like baseball's Ted Williams. The packaged food may also be blasted with frigid air while being passed through a tunnel on a conveyor belt, or may be bathed in a liquid refrigerant, such as a halocarbon.
Freezer Rule #2
Fresher isn't always more nutritious, either.
The quick-chill methods used to preserve frozen fruits and vegetables seal in their high nutrient content. Those vege-tables that end up in the grocer's produce section may have been picked well before they were ripe (and before their nutrients had fully developed) so they'd survive shipment. Or they sit there past their prime, leaking nutrients.
"The ripening process is just the beginning stages of rotting, so it's all downhill from there," says food chemist Robert L. Wolke, author of What Einstein Told His Cook. As a zucchini or a head of broccoli is shipped, then sits in the produce section for a few days, enzymes are breaking down its sugars and other compounds, gradually destroying color and texture. Not to mention nutrients.
"You're generally as well off eating frozen as fresh," says Archer. Research suggests that farm-fresh produce has the highest concentration of vitamins and minerals. But when scientists study the way people eat in the real world, frozen foods often shine brighter. A University of Illinois study from the early 1990s found that frozen beans retained twice as much vitamin C as fresh beans purchased at a grocery store. At Arizona State University, an analysis showed that ready-to-drink orange juice can lose nearly all of its vitamin C content by the expiration date, while frozen OJ loses only about half by the time you mix it.
» Health archive
Men's Health Philippines - January 2006 Issue
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