Other People's Freezers. Q&A with Lou Tamposi
Lou dedicates each of his three freezers to animal cuts.
Q: Hello Lou. Can you please tell us a little about yourself and your website/publication?
A: I write Cow We Doin, a newsletter about living (and eating) radically. It started off as an idea after I woke up — as I often do — thinking about food, and has slowly shifted toward a contemplation on living “with your eyes wide open.” That is, in a nutshell, is what it means to live radically — to be fully aware of what you are doing and how you are living. It’s an intimate connection to the world and in regard to eating, specifically, it means being radically — painfully — aware of where you food comes from and what it takes to bring it to your plate.
I live in New England with my wife, three kids, and a dog. Whenever possible — and now, it’s probably at least 75% of the time — we eat hyper-locally. That means we either grew it or could walk to where it was grown; it means we know the farmers and the ranchers and know whose hands have touched the food to get it to our plates. We try to bring this ethos into all we do — building a connection to land and community as often and as best as we can. Most of my writing revolves around this concept in some form or another, while I simultaneously try not to take myself too seriously!
Q: Can you tell us about your freezer? Make/Model, how old it is, and where you keep it.
A: Much to my wife's chagrin, we have three chest freezers that supplement our fridge/freezer combination. We have two Insignia 10 cu. ft. chest freezers (one in the garage and one in the basement) and one smaller one, maybe 5 cu. ft, which I picked up for next to nothing at a "going out of business sale" at a farm store. (At that sale, the owner tried to sell me a 15x15 walk-in commercial freezer for $25,000 -- but I told him that was probably a bit excessive and walked out with the $30 option!)
Q: What do you mostly use your freezer for? Do you freeze fresh, perhaps homegrown food or do you use it for ready frozen foods?
A: Our family eats a lot of meat -- so, we stock the chest freezers primarily with that -- and, right now, breastmilk for my seven-month old. Because it's radically important to us to know where our food comes from, we rarely buy meat from the grocery store, and instead, rely on meat from animals that we've either known while they were alive, know who raised them, or ones that I've killed myself.
This means at any given time, we might have freezers full of lamb raised by my neighbor, chicken from the Trustees of the Reservation farm around the corner, grass-fed beef from a farm in Rhode Island, bison raised on an Audubon-certified regenerative ranch, or venison hunted in the woods a stone's throw from my house.
The garage freezer right now is filled with frozen milk; four racks of ribs, one neck, and some stew/grind chunks from the whitetail deer I killed last fall; and assorted cuts from the Meat CSA of which we're members (pork, lamb, and beef cuts).
The larger basement freezer is filled with the half bison I just received from my friend Matt at North Bridger Bison; the smaller one has some assorted cuts from the meat share, several bags of bones (to make stock), some lamb organs, and a few dozen pounds of ground beef remaining from a cow I split with a friend last year.
The freezer attached to our refrigerator is stocked primarily with frozen fruit; frozen stock (which we make in huge batches as needed); frozen, pre-sliced sourdough bread (which we make in loaves every week or so); some frozen herbs from our garden; and whatever miscellaneous ice creams and popsicles we have on hand for my kids.
Q: What are your favourite leftovers to freeze?
A: For better or worse, leftovers in our house don't often last long enough to make it to the freezer!
Q: Do you ever batch cook/prepare meals to freeze for later? If so, what kind of meals do you like to make?
A: We don't -- I'm fortunate to have both the time and enthusiasm to cook (or assemble from leftovers) fresh meals most nights. We do, however, make large batches of stock from leftover bones, which we freeze.
In a similar vein, with an abundance of tomatoes this season, we've been batch making a tomato compote and freezing that for use over the fall. This post, ‘On Taking Stock’ includes the recipe for Tomato Compote
We also, as I mentioned, make sourdough roughly weekly, which we’ll pre-slice and freeze, using as needed. My brother-in-law, Uncle Steady, gifted us a starter a few years ago along with his method, and we’ve been following it ever since.
Q: Do you have a system for organising what’s in your freezer? Do you label items when you freeze them?
A: We tend to dedicate each freezer to specific animals or cuts. For example: the "bison" freezer, the "deer" freezer, or the "lamb" freezer. Then, whichever has the most remaining space gets filled with the one-off and miscellaneous cuts. We tend to be fanatical about marking with tape and sharpie the dates and contents or the various packages and containers -- but I've often thought about instating a inventory list.
Q: Have you ever lost track of things and found “mystery containers” in there? What was it and how old was it?
A: Again, we tend to go through our freezers quickly enough where I don't lose track of things. But, that being said, as I was organizing the "wild game" freezer recently, I came across about a pound of turkey trimmings from a bird I shot in the spring of 2024. I had intended to supplement that with the trimmings from anything I got this spring to make sausage -- but since I was unsuccessful this year, those trimmings are still there. I'm trying to decide if I want to keep them pure and make some turkey jerky -- or just wait it out until I get a few more birds!
Q: Freezer bags or Freezer containers? Which do you prefer and recommend?
A: When wrapping meat I've butchered myself, I use a combination of lined freezer paper wrapped again with a layer of unlined paper. Since we're going through most everything in the freezer within 12 months, I haven't found there's a benefit to vacuum-sealing. Stuff from a professional butcher or processor is generally vac-sealed, however. For stock and sauces, we've been freezing in mason jars -- though I've lost so many glass jars to freezer expansion, I'm thinking it might be soon time to try canning (and I’ll be hitting up
for a tutorial)! Bones and bread go in ziploc freezer bags.Q: What are your top tips on the best way to freeze food and organise your freezer?
A: I'm fairly terrible with organization, so my best tip is to treat your freezer like a pantry: use what's in it often.
We tend to have a rough idea of what we want to eat throughout the week, so we make it a point to take out and defrost what we need early. Since most of our meat/protein is coming "from the freezer," this system allows us to have a good sense of what's in there and how to use it. We'll then add that protein to fresh vegetables and grains or starches to bring together a full meal.
My one biggest time saving hack for this system is using a sous-vide for defrosting. If we're coming up on dinner time and I've forgotten to defrost something, I'll often throw it into the sous-vide set at 67(F) (the lowest my machine will go) and let it defrost in the circulating water. Most anything is ready within an hour with this approach -- and usually sooner, since I'm mostly using this for quick cooking steak cuts or grind, not large roasts. You can also theoretically cook from frozen in the sous-vide, but we typically don't do this since it would typically involve cooking the food in plastic -- and I'm sure I consume enough microplastics without that added to the mix!
(I do have to caveat this that the FDA would not condone this method of thawing, since it's defrosting the meat in the "danger zone" of temperature -- but again, we use it for a relatively short period of time and then immediately cook it at high heat. There is a higher risk of food-borne illness from bacterial growth with this method, so understand your own risk vs. convenience tolerance and go from there.)
Thank you, Lou, for allowing us to peek into your freezers. Also, thank you to
for suggesting I get in touch with Lou inviting him to be featured in this series.Read more and subscribe to
publication ‘Cow You Doin”
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The freezer common to me and my Russian neighbours when I lived in Moscow was the balcony. These were all piled high with frozen goodies that had to be consumed before the melt began in April.
Getting a pressure canner for king meat and bone sticks was the best thing I ever did. Saves so much space in the freezer!