I�ve been quite busy recently but I read some post, I couldn�t seem to find, about chilling product after cooking, whether to do it vacuum packed or other, and the potential for botulism and other critters. For those of us without a blast freezer or other high end equipment may I suggest you look at using a salt brine as a heat sink. Depending on what type of freezer space you have this may be a quick way to freeze your Q without using anything you don�t already have available.
We all know that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. A saturated salt brine (about 23% NACL) freezes at about - 6 degrees. Depending upon how you want to do it you can use a brine somewhat within that range to rapidly chill your meat and freeze it at the same time, If you would be interested in making salt ice, you need to have a freezer that will go to at least -10 and it will take about a week or more for the salt solution to freeze depending upon the air circulation of your freezer and the size of the plastic bottles you use to put the brine in. Chill the brine first and then poor it into bottles, because cold water reduces in volume to 39 degrees and then expands thereafter, so the closer you get to the proper temperature the closer you can come to filling your bottles without them blowing up or not filling them. These frozen bottles you can use in your ice chests instead of real ice, or dry ice to take and keep your frozen product for you catering gigs.
But the brine itself can be used as a quick freezing mechanism if you can�t get that cold or don�t want the hassle. Brining is why most of your salad shrimp tastes salty and sometimes has that ice glaze. But you can do the same thing by putting your Q in either freezer bags or vacuum packed and dropping them into a below freezing brine for a cheap quick freezer. The smaller items will freeze faster, remember the shrimp, and all the heat in the meat will eventually end up in the liquid brine so use as much brine as possible, try to regulate the time in the brine with amount for product you would like to chill. It would also be good to monitor the temperature of the brine to see how much heat you can add to it and still have sufficient cold. In other other words once you freeze the bag get it into the freezer itself and move more product into the brine.
Do all this as much as possible in plastic, not only for corrosion possibilities but also you can freeze your pinkies to a stainless hotel pan in a hurry, but with plastic some quick moves can be done without even gloves.
So far I am still experimenting with this, but I learned it is and excellent way to work with fish, for those of us with just normal kitchen type equipment. Warm fish will go from great to worthless in no time if it is not chilled rapidly. Salt is cheap and most of the stuff you already have around. I use table salt which has an anti-caking agent added, I doubt it alters the salts properties significantly and may even help somewhat in the freezing to ice, but it will make your brine solution cloudy, which could probably be averted with rock salt or water softener salt. Table salt also dissolves rapidly.
So if any of you try this, I would appreciate an update.
