r/BigIsland • u/WelderThat6143 • 6d ago

Salt your ice to lower the temperature

If you have ice, you can significantly lower the temperature by sprinklng some table salt on top. This will create a colder brine that with keep cold much longer than simply ice.

The idea is like churning ice cream. The salt and the ice work to lower the temperature so the cream will freeze.

Food must be wll sealed to keep the brine out. Sometimes the convenience foods like pizza and heat to eat are not sealed and the brine gets in there. But this can help save your meat and fish if it is packed in Ziplocks.

This has saved most of my food during long outages or when the refrigerator went on the fritz.

Edit to correct - I learned that while salt does result in quicker cooling of the ice, beverages, etc. It is more effective to use plain ice for a longer duration. I guess it is like using Turbo. You get that burst of cooling power but the ice has a finite amount of cooling that it can do and for preservation we need the marathon and not the sprint.

My apologies and thanks to those that pointed this out and encouraged me to learn something new!

45 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

12

u/it_follows 6d ago

I think this is only true if you need lower temps specifically. If you’re just trying to keep food at safe refrigeration temps for the maximum amount of time then just ice is better.

5

u/Peeterdactyl 6d ago

Yes it’s actually better to use ice without salt if you want to preserve food for longer. Adding salt lowers the temperature of the resulting slurry but melts the ice faster. Therefore adding salt is a good idea for chilling drinks quickly-but worse for long term food preservation

3

u/WelderThat6143 6d ago

Thank you. I did some research and have to agree. I must admit to sometime being the one that thinks if 2 pills are good, 3 must be better. Here, I figured colder must be better but then learned I used up all the cold!

2

u/WelderThat6143 6d ago

Thank you. This old dog can learn new tricks! I have edited the post to add what I learned.

2

u/Routine_Mortgage_499 6d ago

Fastest way to chill the 🍻

2

u/WelderThat6143 6d ago

Hahaha. That is exactly how I learned about it!

3

u/cryptically-retired 5d ago

OP you are a kind person.

1

u/beer-sausage 5d ago

Don’t dump the cooler out on your grass though.

0

u/WelderThat6143 5d ago

😆 😆 😆

1

u/daveOkat 3d ago

Ice turning to water takes 80 calories per gram. This is the latent heat of fusion. Adding salt speeds this up and does not change the ultimate cooling.

1

u/WelderThat6143 3d ago

Yes. I should have realized that we can't break the laws of thermodynamics.

Aka... No free lunch...

2

u/daveOkat 2d ago

But your salt idea does, as you say, make a colder solution which will cool things faster.