Freezer. App

[Honorato Overmyer]

Foryears I researched the art and craft of preserving summer fruit, but I could never bring myself to go ahead and try it myself. What if I did something wrong? What if my jars exploded in the heat? What if I hurt myself or someone I cared about?

Welcome to my vicious cycle. I have, however, broken through my preserving paranoia so that I can enjoy peaches, nectarines and strawberries all year long. I found a baby step on the road to heat-processed canning: freezer jam.

The first summer I made freezer jam, I enjoyed it so much that I preserved everything I could get my hands on. Peaches, plums, nectarines, blueberries, raspberries, you name it. I lined my freezer with row after row of colorful jars, many of which made their way home with friends after dinner parties and high-tea afternoons. Well into February I had fresh, homemade jam every morning to spread on my toast and mix into my homemade yogurt.

The first summer I made freezer jam, I enjoyed it so much that I preserved everything I could get my hands on. Peaches, plums, nectarines, blueberries, raspberries, you name it. I lined my freezer with row after row of colorful jars ... Well into February I had fresh, homemade jam every morning.

Besides mollifying your canning phobia, there's another benefit to not boiling your jam. Uncooked fruit stays much fresher than cooked preserves, so when you crack open your treasure in mid-January, it will taste more like the fresh summer fruit you picked up from the farmers market. Some brands of pectin require that you use boiling water in the initial mix, but this short stint on the stove won't affect the flavor or texture of your fruit.

Most freezer jam recipes contain only three or four ingredients and require half an hour or less for preparation. It's a simple process: peel, chop, mix and freeze. The safety and simplicity of freezer jam makes it a perfect kitchen project for children, who love the idea that they made the tastiest part of their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Stephanie Stiavetti is a food writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. A self-proclaimed literary gastronaut, she spends most of her time thinking about, reading about or writing about food. She can usually be found perusing the cookbook section of used bookstores and posting on her food blog, Wasabimon, or on Twitter under the username "sstiavetti."

If you have children in the house, you might also notice yourself spending less on lunch fixings because decent store-bought jam demands a pretty penny these days. When I make freezer jam, the cost comes out to around 50 cents per 8-ounce container, and I have to say that the taste of homemade jam blows grocery store brands out of the water.

Pectin is the fruit-derived gel that holds jam together and creates a thick consistency. It's important to buy a brand of pectin that is compatible with no-cook freezer jam. Read the instructions carefully, as recipes can (and will) vary from brand to brand. Different kinds of pectin call for different amounts of sugar, so read the directions or your jam won't set correctly. Freezer jams always run a touch thinner than heat-processed preserves, but they should still set to a nice, spreadable consistency. If you prefer a thicker jam, you can heat your fruit to a boil for two minutes before freezing.

When making the recipes below, I used Ball No-Cook Freezer Jam Pectin, with which I've always had good experiences. You can also use any number of other brands, and these days many kinds of pectin allow you to use alternative sweeteners such as honey or Splenda, which is good news for those avoiding refined sugar.

If you do decide to use granulated sugar, it's a good idea to use a superfine variety so that it will dissolve more easily into your fruit. Instead of spending extra money on a specialized product, make it yourself by pulsing regular sugar in a food processor five or six times. Be sure to measure your sugar before grinding it, as it will yield a greater amount once the granules are broken down, and adding extra sweetener may cause your jam to be too sweet.

While you can purchase special plastic containers made for storing jam in the freezer, it's not necessary. You can use whatever sealable plastic containers you have hiding in your cupboards, or you can use good, old-fashioned Mason jars. I usually go with the jars because the whole point of this exercise (for me, anyway) was to act as a precursor to heat canning, and nothing invokes the memory of my grandmother's summer jam more than cute, 8-ounce glass jars with a ribbon tied around the top.

If you decide to use Mason jars, a word of caution: Do not use glassware with "shoulders," or a curvature in the jar just beneath the lid. Instead, use straight-sided jars with a wide mouth. When you freeze liquids, they expand inside the container and push against any curves or shape differences. In the case of glass jars, this can cause breakage and a sticky, razor-sharp mess in your freezer.

After a summer of making freezer jam, I was finally comfortable enough with the process to attempt heat canning. My first batch of preserves, an elderberry-peach recipe that I made up on the fly, came out perfectly and completely free of mishap. While these days I'm much more comfortable with heat-processed canning, I still make freezer jam so that I can preserve the freshness of certain fruits that taste better uncooked. It is still a staple in my house.

On a recent episode of Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy's terrific advice podcast, My Brother, My Brother and Me, the brothers pondered a Yahoo Answers question about what would happen if you put a toaster inside a freezer. (The discussion comes around the 36-minute mark.)

They have a fun discussion of a few aspects of the problem before eventually moving on to the next question. Since they don't really settle on a final answer, I thought we could help them out by taking a closer look at the physics of freezer toasters.

The coils in regular toasters get hot enough to glow, which means they're over about 600C. Since the toaster is operating at such high temperatures, it would hardly notice whether the surrounding environment is 20C (room temperature), 4C (a fridge), or -15C (a freezer).[1]The zero on our usual temperature scales can confuse things, since it makes it seem like going from 10 to 20 is "doubling" the temperature. But the "zero" on the Celsius scale is just a point chosen by convention. If we switch to Kelvin, which counts in degrees above absolute zero, a freezer is 260 K, a fridge is 275 K, a normal room is 295 K ... and the heating element in a toaster is 900 K.

The toaster needs to heat its coils from room temperature to somewhere over 600C. From the toaster's point of view, a 20- or 40-degree change in starting temperature hardly matters. The coils will get hot, and then the bread will get hot, too. If the bread is colder at the start, the toaster will have to heat it a little longer to get it up to ideal toasting temperature, but it will have no trouble getting there. As anyone who's ever burned a piece of toast knows, toasters are definitely capable of heating bread to above the ideal temperature for toast.

In their discussion, the McElroys brought up another question: Even if the toaster can still toast bread at first, would it struggle to stay warm over time? If you left both the toaster and the freezer running, who would win in the long term?

The answer is that the toaster would still win. A toaster produces about a thousand watts of heat, and the cooling system in a household freezer can't remove heat that fast. In fact, since freezers are so well insulated, the inside of the freezer would probably get much hotter than the rest of the house, and eventually the toaster and/or the freezer would probably overheat.[2]Either device have a safety cutoff that stops things from actually melting down, but it's probably not wise to count on that in this situation.

Refrigerators and freezers work by soaking up heat from their interior and dumping it out the back.[3]That's why the area behind your freezer is warm, and why you can't cool a room by leaving the fridge door open. In a sense, they're more efficient than toasters. Fridges have a "coefficient of performance" of 2 or 3, which means it only takes them 1 unit of electrical energy to move 2 or 3 units of heat energy from the interior to the exterior. A toaster, on the other hand, produces 1 unit of heat from 1 unit of electricity. But since the compressor in a fridge-freezer typically only uses 100 or 150 watts when it's running,[4]You can see some real-world graphs of refrigerator power usage, courtesy people with home electricity meters, with a simple Google Image search. The distinctive on-off square-wave pattern is the compressor switching on and off throughout the day, while the big spikes are the heating element that keeps frost from building up on the coils. This power consumption is split between the fridge and the freezer, but if the fridge is already cold, most of the energy will be spent fighting with the toaster. so even with the efficiency multiplier, it can't keep up with the toaster's 1000+ watts of heat production.

Eventually, the toaster will start to heat up the inside of the freezer. Even if the freezer were as powerful as the toaster, it wouldn't be able to keep the toaster coils themselves from getting hot and toasting bread. The freezer can make the air around the toaster cold, but remember, to the toaster, all our air is cold.

If you happen to live in the Canadian city of Winnipeg, you can check this experimentally. The winter temperature at night in Winnipeg is about the same as the inside of a freezer, so the environment there effectively simulates a freezer with infinite capacity to absorb heat. Suppose you put a toaster out on your porch one night, plugged in by an extension cord, and leave it running for a few hours, going outside every so often to collect the toast and put in some fresh bread. What will happen? Simple: You'll quickly be eaten by wolves.

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