To help foods stay frozen in your ice chest, freeze a brine solution in a reusable container and place it into the chest. A frozen brine solution is slower to melt than ice and will keep food frozen longer.Fill a clean milk jug with water, leaving about 1″ of space for expansion. Add 1/4 cup of salt to the water, replace the cap and shake well. Mark the jug as “brine” or “non-drinkable water” so there isn’t any confusion in camp. If you have a large cooler, make two jugs.
Freeze the brine solution, shaking it several times during the freezing process to redistribute the salt. Place the frozen jug into the bottom of the cooler and pack frozen meat and other frozen items around it. Add more ice and the other items that don’t need to be frozen.
Keep the cooler in the shade and open it as little as possible. It might even be wise to have a second cooler for non-perishables, like canned or bottled beverages, so you aren’t getting into the frozen food cooler as much. Remove the meat and let it thaw before the planned meal. If this works properly, the meat will not thaw in this cooler.
There is no need to make this solution every time you use the cooler. Just put the jug back into the freezer when you get home, and it will be ready for the next trip.
Glad to see that this bit of wisdom is being passed on. Any hunter/camper worth his salt (pun intended) knows this “trick” but I’m happy to see that someone thought enough of it to pass it on.
Just another obvious add-on to your tip. You can really extend the life of your perishables by placing a 1″ piece of rigid styrofoam insulation on top of the contents prior to closing the lid which, in many cases, is uninsulated.
Not only your cooler, but filled jugs of brine in an empty chest freezer also help to keep food during an extended power outage, it more efficiently freezes any meat you put in there, works more efficiently, and the jugs can be easily removed and thawed as you are successful in the field. A full freezer is a happy freezer.
I love this idea and use it myself. The only thing I do different is when I put my brine together I put it in a gallon bag and fill it about 3/4 of the way. Then seal it and lay it flat in my freezer to get hard. Once it is hard I can stack them for use in my cooler. I found the gallon jugs to be to awkward and took up too much space. Using bags I can write on with marker but really not needed since bags of water are easy to figure out as the brine water. They can be placed in bottom and top of cooler without using a bunch of room and seem to last a very long time even though they are thinner than a jug. If you stand them like a book you can line the sides of your cooler and still have plenty of bulk room in the center. 🙂
Great tip Robin.
Thanks, Pete!
I use Gatorade or Poeerade or other electrolytes replacement solution diluted by half with distilled water for my brine solution. I also have used beef, chicken and vegetable stocks .in placevof plain brine solutions . This gives this big user of space in the cooler do double duty.
After I’ve taken the mylar bag out of a wine box and wrung the last 3/4 of a glass of wine out of it I re-purpose the bag. You can pry the stopper out and fill it with freshwater or salt water Leaving about 15% unfilled to allow for expansion.Squeeze out the air. Lay flat in freezer to freeze.
Good article Robin! The “How To” part is perfect.
Here’s why it works: A frozen brine solution will help foods stay frozen in your ice chest, but not because a frozen brine solution is “slower to melt.” It’s because the brine ice melts at a lower temperature than the pure water ice. Depending on how much salt is in your brine, it could start melting at 28, or 25, or even 20 degrees or lower. While it’s melting it holds everything in the ice chest at that lower temperature, so those things stay frozen until the brine solution melts completely. In a chest with pure water ice everything in the chest is thawing out right along with with the ice, because it’s melting at 32 degrees.
Thanks, Bernard. I’m glad you could explain that so clearly.