The worst thing that any home cook can do is to buy a great big deep freeze. Deep freezes are like garages; no matter how big it is it will always end up full of stuff, and unfortunately, that prime rib roast is not going to age nearly as well in your freezer as the skis and bike in your garage. I lived most of my adult life without a deep freeze, though now that I have kids I’m glad that I eventually bought a small one.

Around Christmas I will usually have turkey and a few appetizers in there and in the summer I will have a few boxes of popsicles and ice cream sandwiches. Ice cream and popsicles keep really well in a freezer for long periods of time, but if you were to look inside the typical deep freeze you will see that it’s full of steaks, roasts, and fish. Meat and fish do not handle being frozen for extended periods of time nearly as well as ice cream.

I have stored some roasts in the freezer myself. I would see a fantastic special at the grocery store and pick up two roasts; one to cook right away and the other to freeze for another time. What I found was that before I got around to using the roast in my freezer there would be another sale so rather than thawing the frozen roast I would just buy another fresh one. It turns out grocery stores have sales on different cuts of beef quite frequently.

The only reason you should have a giant freezer full of meat is if you are in the business of breaking into butcher shops. There’s nothing wrong with having a couple of steaks and some leftover chilli in a freezer, but it makes no sense to stock up on frozen meat. There will always be some sort of sale at the grocery store for some sort of dead animal, so why have a month’s worth of frozen meat piled up in your basement freezer?

Even if you love good deals and think meat tastes better after it has been frozen for a couple of years, you need to keep in mind that a single power outage can turn your treasure trove of hoarded frozen meat into a rotting pile of garbage. If you like stockpiling food, you are better off having a bigger pantry than deepfreeze. Rather than stocking up on steaks, you should keep an eye out for sales on things like sugar, flour, rice and canned tomatoes. Those things go on sale too and they generally have a longer expiry date than the person buying them.