Cleaning out our freezers | Making room for our pig!

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We are getting a whole pig this winter so we are trying to clean out some freezer space.  We aren’t going to buy another one since we have plenty of freezers and space. But I have tallow and bones taking up a large space that could be on a shelf in my basement.  So I have been slowly but surely processing throughout the weeks.  One of our freezers has a freezer max system in it, and let me tell you, it is one hundred percent worth. It.

We have a half of a cow in our chest freezer and this is our third time buying one.  The first time we purchased bulk beef we got a quarter of a cow, and bought a small chest freezer, it was inexpensive and we didn’t save for it (that was our bad!). It worked for the time being, but we had so much beef we didn’t use because we didn’t know it was in there! The second time we got our beef, we upgraded to half a cow, because even though there were cuts we missed, we went through it very quickly, we have a large family and there were cuts we didn’t get with a quarter cow.  But for this one we decided on a stand up freezer, thinking we could organize it better.  While we could organize it better, there wasn’t as much usable space and I was always paranoid that the door wasn’t shut.  I did find out the hard way that there is an alarm on it if the door is open for an extended time. 

The third time around we wanted a very specific model chest freezer but it was 1) discontinued, and 2) had horrible reviews since the company had been sold to a Chinese manufacturer.  We ended up buying a 14 sq. ft chest freezer and I bought this freezer max system and Ryan installed it in about 20 minutes.  This system is so well thought out, it is three rows or rails you put into your warm freezer, using a template that came with it to make sure spacing is correct, then baskets sit in on each rail system.  So each row has its own type of cut, the bottom row is roasts, the middle is steaks and ribs, and the top is ground beef. This freezer doesn’t really need us to clean it out so since it’s already pretty organized, but this is all part of explaining how and why we are doing what we are doing.

Now that you know this setup: our small chest freezer has all the leftover bones and tallow that I need clean out for this pig. I also need to make use of these fruits and veggies we froze this summer.  We plan on putting our pork in this small one and use any leftover parts of the freezer max system and boxes to make sure this keeps semi-organized.  As first stated, I am slowly making room for the pig so I pulled out ten pounds of beef fat and rendered it. I let it sit in the refrigerator overnight to thaw slightly enough to cut, I really only trimmed some of the meat still on it but I should have cut it into smaller chunks than the 3-4 inch chunks but I was in a hurry.  I put it into a crockpot with about three cups of water and 1-2 tablespoons of salt and melted it on high for about 2 hours until it was all melted. Then I let it simmer on low for another couple of hours and then ladled it out through a mesh strainer into a metal bowl.  Once it cooled in the fridge and was solid, I tried shimmying it out of the bowl but it was too thick! So I had to cut through it with a knife and break it out in four pieces, after pulling the tallow out of the water it was sitting on, there was still some salt and impurities on the bottom so I scraped that off with the flat edge of a knife.  I did this process two more times.  I ended up with two and a half quarts of tallow, I could have had more but I didn’t melt the tallow completely down, but I will have enough to last us until we get another cow! Next, I made two batches of bone broth, I started off using the gas stove and a large stock pot, but I didn’t want to run through the gas and moved it to the crockpot.  I didn’t add any flavorings because I am trying to make it as multi-use as possible, also, I forgot. haha. I don’t like pressure canning the bone broth because it loses its gelatin-“ness” so we drank this and I did put it in the freezer, but it was the one in our kitchen and that is not going to be used for the pig.  I still have quite a few bags of fat and bones to process, so I will keep tabs on those, I also plan on making more than one batch of broth with the bones and then processing the seconds and thirds to keep in my pantry for soups.  

Hopefully we will clean out our freezer enough to have enough space, or we will be eating a lot of pork hah!

If you want to read posts from our garden from last year, click here!