Supermarket savings...

Hi Folks,

I'm probably very late coming to this, but I have recently discovered the joys of buying bulk, doing some minimal processing at home, and then storing of food. A few weeks back we did a whole deer for the first time. It was a steep learning curve, but very successful.

But this week I discovered our supermarket had whole salmon. 3.5kg a fish, at £7.00 per kilo. Now we do eat salmon periodically, but we tend to buy smaller portions for a specific meal. The smaller portions work out at around £22/kilo.
So last night I spent 20 minutes learning how to fillet a salmon. We had pan fried salmon for dinner, with deliciously crispy skins. One whole side is brining for putting in the smoker. Three more meals worth are vacuum sealed and in the freezer in appropriate portion sizes. I probably saved us about £40, compared to buying the packaged portions. Well worth doing.

I have spotted similar disparity in prices between whole chicken and chicken pieces. I can see myself portioning up some birds over the holiday.

Key to making this all work for us was the vacuum sealer. It has pretty much become my favorite kitchen gadget over the past few months. Next upgrade will be a proper chest freezer!

Hi Michael,
This is good info. On thing for people to keep in mind is that much of the seafood that is in supermarkets has been frozen once already. Nothing wrong with buying in bulk, but have that in mind if you plan to refreeze.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Michael,
This is good info. On thing for people to keep in mind is that much of the seafood that is in supermarkets has been frozen once already. Nothing wrong with buying in bulk, but have that in mind if you plan to refreeze.

Refreezing is not generally a problem in and of itself PROVIDED that it remains in a temperature controlled setting while defrosting. So if you let your frozen stuff thaw in the fridge refreezing should be fine.

The reason there is advice against refreezing is that too many people defrost things like meat by setting it out on the side in a warm kitchen.

Switching to whole chickens was one of the best cooking decisions I've made. Pork and chicken alternate sales where I am at, so when chickens go on sale I will buy 3-4 whole birds, cook one, and freeze the others until I'm ready to use them. Our oven is small, so we usually partition the chickens into pieces and use them for various recipes.

Doing this has caused me to broaden my chicken recipes as well, since previously I would usually just buy chicken breasts and the occasional thighs. But when you end up with all the cuts from a whole chicken, it forces you to find new recipes to use up the entire thing.

When they are on sale, I am able to save about 75% per pound buying whole sustainably raised chickens instead of conventionally raised chicken breasts. Plus, you have the carcass for making stock, which isn't cheap either.

We will boil the organs and feed them to our dog. She loves them, and I know they are a nutritious complement to her kibble as well!

We are currently borrowing my MIL's vacuum sealer, because we wanted to experiment with sous vid, maybe we should be using it for more things?  We do like to buy based on what's on sale and often that means buying bigger portions than we can eat in one or two meals, so we do freeze things and save them for later.  The key so far is remembering to eat things in a timely fashion, rather than forgetting they're in there.  We do something that most people would frown upon, we don't stock up on food for later, we try and think a small while ahead but not too far ahead.  This prevents us from ever having yucky things like freezer burn, because we eat everything in a timely manner.  Would things last longer in the freezer when people vacuum seal them?  That's probably a dumb question, but we're new to the vacuum sealer.