Freezing Chicken

I really like my grocery store. It's my favorite grocery store, even though others have come to town with their buildings the size of small cities, containing an amazing assortment of goods. Those of you around here probably know I mean Maceys. Small town chain. I think there are 10 of them total. Lucky people that live near one of them.

The reason I am so happy with them today, is they had chicken on sale. $1.20 for a pound. Yes, boneless, skinless chicken breast. Of course, there was a catch. I had to buy 40 pounds. That really doesn't hurt my feelings at all, though, since I will cook some of it and freeze the rest. 40 pounds of chicken is really not too much.

When I decide to have a freezer cooking day and put some more meals in my freezer, I will thaw what I need, put it in the recipes I desire, and freeze them for later. It is NOT TRUE that you cannot re-freeze chicken (or any other meat, for that matter.)You can re-freeze it and never ever be able to tell the difference.

Those who would caution you about re-freezing meat probably either, 1. believe the legend that you can't refreeze meat, but don't know why. Or, 2. know that when you re-freeze meat, you run the risk of letting meat get too warm when it thaws, letting it get cooties, then freezing the cooties while falsely believing that the cooties would die in the freezer. The truth is, if you freeze cooties they'll just wait until later to make you sick. So it is just easier to say don't re-freeze meat.

But now you know, You can re-freeze meat, you just need to be careful and make sure the chicken (any meat) never comes to room temperature. It should never be allowed to get less than very cold.

40 pounds is a lot of chicken so I'm going to freeze the bulk of it, however, I would rather get the exact amount of frozen chicken that I need from my freezer. In other words, I don't ever want to deal with a frozen solid block of chicken. Especially not a 40-pound block of chicken. It actually comes divided into 4 separate bags, but I don't want to mess with a 10-pound block of frozen chicken, either.

Instead, I trim and clean each piece. This is important to me because I don't want to have to do it later when I want to cook with it. Then I put each chicken breast into a separate sandwich baggie. The fold-over kind, not the kind with the zipper. These are very much less expensive and are just the right size and so very easy to work with. I put the chicken in, press the flat flap inside on top of the chicken and then, while holding the plastic down on the chicken, I fold the outside piece over the whole thing. I press out all the air to help protect it from freezer burn.

Then I put as many as will fit in a gallon freezer bag. I lay them all flat so they will freeze uniformly. About 8 fit nicely, but it will really depend on how big the pieces are. After all, all chickens are not endowed equally. =D

When I need chicken, whether a little or a lot, I take exactly what I need from the freezer. How marvelous.