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Help your freezer do its job
By Adele Ong
Published: December 3 2007,
CATS Classified in The Straits Times
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Freezers are indispensable for longer-term storage of raw meat and cooked food, easy access to ice, and for treats like ice-cream. In our climate, it is especially important for refrigerators and freezers to work well, because the food inside would otherwise go off incredibly quickly. Use these pointers to keep your freezer ship-shape:

• For optimum performance, a freezer should be kept at –18 deg C, and a fridge at below 5 deg C. The thermostats built into a refrigerator let you select a desired temperature, but may not reflect actual temperatures inside the appliance, so purchase stand-alone thermometers to ensure that your food is stored in the right conditions. Specialised fridge and freezer thermometers are made to handle the low temperatures, and many can clip onto a fridge shelf or freezer basket.



• Don’t put hot foods or liquids into your freezer or fridge, because that will raise the overall temperature inside, force the appliance to use more energy as it works harder, and affect the state of the other chilled items.



• On the other hand, leaving cooked food lying around for hours before putting it away in the freezer only breeds bacteria, so once you decide that the food you’ve cooked is to be frozen for use on another day, cool it quickly by standing the container in tap or ice water, and replace the water when it warms up. Once the food reaches room temperature, pop it into the freezer.



• Clean your freezer on a regular basis to prevent frost build-up, which affects the freezer’s performance.



• Don’t keep opening and closing the freezer door. Whenever you do open it, leave it open for as short a time as possible. Each time the freezer is opened, warm air rushes in and cold air gets out, so it is forced to work harder.