Today, I am here to make a case for the freezer as the unsung hero of your kitchen. You see, before my wild-caught seafood journey began, I regarded the freezer as nothing more than a repository, somewhere to relegate the uneaten, a place where items such as leftovers and TV dinners wind up to meet their chilly demise. But when you marry an Alaskan, especially one from a fishing family, the freezer becomes exalted. It transforms into a vault, a chest of treasures. It becomes not simply the final resting place of food, but instead the new source of what is most fresh. These days, I view my freezer not merely as a kitchen appliance, but as a place to preserve, the vessel that not only stores, but in fact, gets full credit for also being the chief keeper of my seafood’s peak freshness.
In celebration of the freezer, I am excited to share with you a new essay from longtime Kallenberg family friend and sockeye freedom fighter Melanie Brown. As I learn from her experiences, I’m inspired to continue to lean into the Alaskan ways of eating in accordance with nature's cycles and preserving the bounty of nature through winter.
The Light of the Freezer in Winter
By Melanie Brown
Alaskans take great pride in hunting, fishing, and gathering their own food. We are very fortunate to live in a place where the lands and waters of our great state are alive and productive. In many ways, our lives are guided by the cycle of living by the seasons and the months where we can connect with the land when it is in its most prolific state. This is the time when we go out and do the work to bring food in and store it in our freezers to get us through the winter so we can live to do it again next year. There is a cradle to grave aspect of preparing for harvest, bringing in the harvest, processing it and then sharing this wealth. Family ties and friendships are deepened by these shared activities and the beautiful thing about processing and freezing soon after catching is that the freshness of fish and game is preserved and locked in until the bounty is thawed, prepared and consumed. In this way, our freezers provide us with the light of summer and the sustenance of our bounty that is frozen in time.
Beyond Meal Planning
When a freezer is well stocked with the favorite foods of spring, summer and fall it allows us to shop through our freezers when planning a meal in lieu of buying that protein in the store. It is fun to think about what can be incorporated into a loving meal based on what is in the freezer. When I look into my freezer, I can picture cubed rockfish poached in fish bone broth served with wild blueberries baked into muffins. (By the way, a pro tip for cutting nice cubes from fish is to do so before the fish is fully thawed!) I see herring spawn frozen in sea water on hemlock boughs and think of making an amazing fish salad. I picture full hearts and bellies when I bake perfect wild sockeye fillets with a side of par-boiled sea asparagus, another treasure from the freezer that brings a taste of summer. A hot toddy of juice squeezed from thawed high bush cranberries makes a wonderful tonic to cap a meal of wild foods. The possibilities become endless when one has good ingredients to gather and save in the freezer. It's fun when your kitchen seems as much a food lab as a place to prepare great meals.
Sustenance through the Freezer
For some Alaskans, harvesting wild foods and saving them in the freezer helps to offset the cost of buying foods at the store. There are many communities or villages in our state that do not even have stores where food is available for purchase, and feeding families requires a well-stocked freezer or even using the cold outdoors to keep food frozen until it is consumed. When the food is properly frozen, it makes for a dependable source of sustenance throughout the year. Many Alaskans have dedicated chests or upright freezers on their porches or in their garages because of the need to be able to store large amounts of summer bounty to get through the winter. When my parents were first married and could not afford an extra freezer, the trunk of their car in the cold of interior Alaska served as their makeshift frozen storage space.
Freezing in Nutrition
Freezing the riches of harvest time at the peak of its freshness can provide a family with food that is sometimes more nutritious than foods that have never been frozen because the arc of degradation is halted by suspending the food in a frozen state. Enjoying freshly harvested food is a wonderful experience that is hard to beat, but freezing your catch as soon as it is cut and packaged to enjoy whenever you choose is a very close rival to never frozen and also eliminates anxiety related to spoilage from holding on to ‘fresh’ fish for too long before consumption. Freezing fish is the most expedient way to preserve your catch and the best way to approximate preparing freshly caught fish after gently slacking it out in your fridge overnight if you plan ahead. If you forget to pull your fish out of the freezer the day before you can thaw it in cold water after taking it out of the packaging. There are also ways of cooking your fish frozen that save the time and planning involved with thawing.
Sharing Experiences Through Frozen Food
Knowing that meals are possible because of time taken to put foods aside for winter in the freezer and the people who shared their harvest gives one a great feeling of heartful wealth. It also provides the ultimate form of food security. To me, it is as good as having money in the bank knowing that this food is there, laden with meaning, memories and connection to my community. This frozen treasure calls us to share with those we love and brings light and memories, along with its nutrition, when we need it most in the dark cold days of winter. The real trick is to pull this wealth from the freezer in a timely manner, to empty the freezer in time for filling it again when the time of harvest begins anew each year (but more on that later!). This is how we live wild and with the seasons in Alaska.
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I just love everything about this. Especially when she says: “to me, it is as good as having money in the bank knowing that this food is there, laden with meaning, memories and connection to my community.”
Thank you, Melanie, for sharing your insight and experiences with us!
Live Wild,
Monica
Pictured above: A portrait of Melanie in the kitchen, cradling a catch from the sea.
