Help with DIY flash freezing

So I'm at home trying to do the DIY flash freeze trick. I have a 5 gallon cooler filled with 26lbs dry ice. I mixed in 3/4 of a gallon of denatured alcohol. And now the alcohol is cold but not crazy cold and most of the dry ice is sitting submerged in the alcohol. I only did this a few minutes ago but I usually expect immediate results with most things. Am I missing something? Do I need to be more patient and just wait for the dry ice to desolve and the alcohol to get even colder? Any advice from someone with experience doing this? Thanks guys

It ought to work. I have allot of experience with that exact thing on a small scale, like a quart of alcohol and a couple pounds of dry ice.  We would run lab tests down to -60 F easy with such a mixture.

Try busting the ice into smaller pieces and mix it gently. When we did it in the lab we would start with the alcohol at room temp and add small pieces of dry ice to the alcohol, the first ones would gas off to nothing and soon the temp of the alcohol would drop like a rock.  Basically we would end up volume wise using about equal volumes of alcohol and dry ice, sounds like you've got allot more ice than liquid, but it should still work pretty quickly if it's all in an ice chest.  Use care though in just a regular ice chest the dry ice can get the plastic cold enough to crack.

Do you have a thermometer that goes well below 0 so you can see where you're at?

Also if there too much water in the alcohol it'll solidify and the whole mess won't work for you.

Keep us posted as to how it goes.

So when you flash freeze like this, am I safe to assume that the item being frozen is already sealed in a Vacu seal or Ziplock?

Nope I just dip the fish directly in the alcohol, it helps the freezing process work faster and the alcohol lights up and quickly sears the fish when you cook it. It all burns off anyway.



Hahahaha yeah I put it in a vacuum sealed bag

Nope I just dip the fish directly in the alcohol, it helps the freezing process work faster and the alcohol lights up and quickly sears the fish when you cook it. It all burns off anyway.



Hahahaha yeah I put it in a vacuum sealed bag

I started reading this, and I'm thinking to myself that this guy is insane... nice.

Update-

So it took about two days for the ice to desolve into the alcohol but it finally did. Just a few minutes ago I put 2 lbs of mussels, cooked and cleaned, in a vacuum sealed bag. I submerged the bag in the alcohol in my cooler. The alcohol began fizzing wildly and about a minute later I removed the bag to find out the mussels were frozen rock hard. F***ing cool this totally works. I will be doing this more often in the future. I may be wrong but I also suspect denatured alcohol will maintain its temperature in a more stable manner than dry ice. I will put more alcohol and more dry ice in the cooler. I will then wrap it in foam and try to keep it insulated as much as possible. Dry ice ain't free. Btw I bought my dry ice at praxair, they sell dry ice, welding supplies, gasses etc.

Sounds ice cold.....chuck  

Sashimi grade at home....sweet.

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One last update-

It did occur to me that between the cost of the alcohol and the dry ice. That two lbs of mussels are not a good justification for spending 60$. So...I will do a bit more experiemnting to see how many pounds of things I can flash freeze and how long the liquid stays sub zero. This likely will be cost effective after a day of ab diving or after multiple people catch crab limits and want to preserve the shucked meat. Also in regards to the mussels I froze. I had another vacuum sealed bag of mussels I had stuck in the freezer and frozen normally. The color difference between the flash frozen and slow frozen is notable. The flash frozen mussels stayed bright orange and every last detail is visible. The slow frozen mussels darkened to a redish hue and mashed together a little bit more.

 Anyway, I'm still pretty stoked about this new crazy cool trick. Remember dry ice from praxair, denatured alcohol from the paint section of your hardware store, a cooler, a vacuum sealer, and plenty of fresh seafood to freeze. Cheers

If you're looking for a cheaper alternative, consider the following.

Saturate water with salt, something like 1/4 cup of salt to 1 gallon of water.  Put like 4 gallons of this in a 5 gallon bucket and put that in your chest freezer.  This solution will stay liquid to <0 degrees F.  You'll be amazed how fast you mussels will freeze in this solution.

-Allen

If you're looking for a cheaper alternative, consider the following.

Saturate water with salt, something like 1/4 cup of salt to 1 gallon of water.  Put like 4 gallons of this in a 5 gallon bucket and put that in your chest freezer.  This solution will stay liquid to <0 degrees F.  You'll be amazed how fast you mussels will freeze in this solution.

-Allen

The same principle can be applied to an ice chest... by adding salt to the water along with the ice things get much colder faster...  This is genius though... the solution being liquid below zero allows for convective cooling over tons of surface area to take place when the object being frozen is submerged.  Awesome.

If you're looking for a cheaper alternative, consider the following.

Saturate water with salt, something like 1/4 cup of salt to 1 gallon of water.  Put like 4 gallons of this in a 5 gallon bucket and put that in your chest freezer.  This solution will stay liquid to <0 degrees F.  You'll be amazed how fast you mussels will freeze in this solution.

-Allen

This sounds like a good method but it seems to me your salt water solution won't actually get much below 32 degrees. Unless I'm mistaken it will only get as cold as your freezer is capable of getting. True it will be colder than 32 and it will freeze much faster than normal because the bag is submerged. I would explore this option if it were not for my second problem with this method; I don't have a chest freezer. I willl be buying one in the next few months as I am in the process of cleaning out a storage area and soon I will have space for one. But at that point I might as well put the entire cooler with the denatured alcohol in the freezer, I probably will. Thanks for the technique I will experiment with it.

You are correct, it won't get any colder than the freezer itself, but most freezers... especially deep freezers... get much colder than 32F.   Most freezers "normal" setting is 0F.  5F is the minimum temp considered "safe" for food storage.  So zero degree salt water is going to freeze stuff really quickly.  However, there really does need to be a significant volume of water so that it's temp doesn't rise significantly when objects to be frozen are added, so yeah... you need some serious freezer space.

any idea how cold the alcohol gets with dry ice?

any idea how cold the alcohol gets with dry ice?

I think that is essentially liquid nitrogen... so, really, really fricken cold.

I don't think the alcohol gets any colder than the dry ice (-109 f) but it doesn't freeze. So when you immerse your product it will freeze much faster.