Just dropped off both of my deer at Johnny G’s. Totaled 100 lbs. of raw meat (and bone), consisting of 4 shoulders, 4 hams, 4 backstraps, and various other bits. Not a bad take I would say. Going to get the backstraps whole but cleaned up, the tenders whole but cleaned up, the doe hams will be steaked, the buck hams will be made into roasts, and everything else ground. The ground is going to be pure deer grind, no mixing with beef or pork or any extra fat as Wife wants to have it pure so she can mix and match it as she pleases. Johnny G’s will let it age a few days but who knows… with Thanksgiving they may not even start on it until Friday. I’ve been reading that aging venison at least a few days is good. Can’t wait!
Thing is, we need a freezer now. We bought a new fridge almost 2 years ago and moved the old fridge into the garage. Both are fairly full, especially in the freezer (what still with all the pork from my prior hog hunts). For some years Wife and I have talked about buying a whole calf or a side of beef, but we never pulled the trigger on the idea. The past couple months we’ve been doing some serious talk about it and have found a few places we might buy from (and keep finding more). Now with all this venison coming, push has come to shove and it’s time for the freezer to be bought. Hopefully we can buy one this weekend and there will be all sorts of sales going on. We’ll start filling it with the deer, then finish it off with some beef.
Meat good. 🙂
Oh yes. Need to finally buy a vacuum sealer too.
Stuff From Hsoi 
You will want a separate chest freezer for storing bambi bits. Stand-up freezers may be easier to organize/find things in, but chest freezers are more inherently efficient and if you buy one with dividers, organization can be easy. If you peruse the energystar.gov site you will soon realize that the Sears Kenmore line has the most models of affordable/available chest freezers that are energy star rated.
We bought a 19.2ft3 Kenmore Model 16082 a couple years ago and we’ve been nothing but satisfied. Depending on your needs, you might not need one so big but right now Sears does have a 15% rebate on all appliances which would make a brand new 14.8ft3 Kenmore Model 16542 that uses an average 357kWh/yr a little less than $400 after tax. A bargain if you ask me. The Sears Grand stores in Austin generally have these well in stock and often offer free delivery/setup if you haggle a bit.
Wow! Excellent information. Thank you so much for giving it.
Believe it or not, Sears was going to be my first choice. I’ve had a lot of good luck with Sears stuff, especially their appliances (many things Kenmore in my house).
I want to ask tho. Chest or upright? You seem to be all about the chest freezer, but certainly as I ask and Google around, there’s no definitive answer and everyone has a different opinion. The only thing definitive is that of floor space… if you can’t support the chest footprint well, there you go. I see pros and cons of each, and I still don’t know which I should do. My leaning is if I’ve got the space (likely so, just haven’t pulled out the tape measure yet), I’d go with a chest. But certainly haven’t made up my mind.
Uprights do take up less horizontal area and they are easier to organize/find things in. All that is true. However, a chest freezer is inherently more efficient because it acts as a vessel for cold air thats opened from the top. An upright is opened from the front and whenever you open it you spill out hundreds of BTUs worth of cold air for every second its open. A chest freezer maintains its supply of cold air more or less intact when opened since the air is pooled in the vessel. An upright is only as good as the seal on the door. If that seal becomes compromised due to mold/dirt/etc you get cold air leakage around the door. A chest freezer’s seal doesn’t have to work anywhere near as well to prevent significant cold air loss. An upright freezers door is easier to leave open accidentally and if left open it will result in thawed food at a much faster rate than a chest freezer with its lid left accidentally open.
But to really get to the more significant point, chest freezers offer lower cost per ft3 and fewer average kWh per year per ft3. To me those figures alone are more than enough reason to go with chest over upright.
Growing up we had a fridge with the freezer on the bottom and I learned to not like that because you’d always have stuff collecting at the bottom that NEVER got rotated out except maybe once in a small lifetime. 🙂 In our current main fridge the freezer is on the bottom, but it has better organization and use of space so for the most part we don’t have that problem. Thus that’s one reason I’ve been against a chest.
However.
You provide a lot of good reasons, some of which I’ve heard before. And they are compelling reasons too. Plus one thing I don’t like about upright freezers is the cubic feet also includes the doors, which really aren’t going to work well for stacking slabs of meat. Thus again, chest makes better use of the space.
You’re making me lean more strongly towards a chest. 🙂
Head on down to your local Sears Grand and have a look inside their Kenmore chest freezers. You’ll notice the new divider/organizer system is much more user-friendly than in years past and its much easier now to keep your bambi bits from dropping down into the deep freeze oubliette.
I did some reading on the Kenmore Elite series last night. The 25 and 20 ft^3 models look really good. I’ll probably go for the 20 model, but if we can fit the 25 well… might as well!
Hsoi,
Don’t forget to check the store’s “Scratch & Dent” inventory.
From experience in the retail business, you can save from 10 to 50% on slightly scuffed up merchandise. Display models are often marked down considerably as well as stuff with small cosmetic damage.
Yup. That was another place of consideration. I could really care less how pretty it is, since it’s going to be in the garage anyway. Actually I should say, Wife really doesn’t care since it’s in the garage and she won’t have to look at it. 😉
This is one of the things I love about having my iPhone: the data/Internet access. Now I can be there in the store and look stuff up immediately. So if I went to some scratch & dent store with models I wasn’t sure about, I could look it all up right then and there and get the scoop. So nice.
In case you hadnt noticed, Sears has a 25% off Kenmore Elite Black Friday sale going if you can tolerate dealing with all the throngs of angry shopping monkies from 4am to noon.
Believe it or not, I was just talking with my Mom (now visiting) about the freezers.
I think there’s actually a appliance-only store not too far from the house, which might be a bit better than trying to get into Barton Creek Mall.
I did the Black Friday thing once probably 10 years ago. I swore never again, but I may make a quick exception for this. Or heck, if I can buy it off sears.com and never set foot in the store, great!
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