Large Cold Meat
Could Play Doh save meat in a power failure?
I live in the Houston area. Just threw out everything in my freezer after a week of no electricity. I had this wacky idea (too late to do any good) and I wanted to bounce it off somebody. Homemade play doh always contains salt which would make its freezing point lower. What if you made a Very Large batch before the storm and stuffed it in your freezer, filling every cranny and crevice between packages of meat, bags of veggies, etc. so all air was excluded and you had a solid block and then put the freezer on the lowest setting until the power outage hit. Would the combination of insulation and super cold play doh save your food? Would the solid block of playdoh expand when it froze and damage the freezer? What if you left a one inch space all around the perimeter to allow for expansion?
Your idea isn’t without merit. Yes, play doh could be used as a heat sink to preserve food in the event of a power failure. However, the fact that it has salt and a lower freezing point than water is not directly relevant to the discussion.
What you should look for is not the freezing point of the medium, but rather its heat capacity – its ability to absorb lots of heat energy w/o changing temperature. Ideally, you want a material that once chilled, can stay cold for long periods of time, thereby keeping whatever food you store with it cold too.
I suspect you’ll find that plain water, frozen as ice, would be more efficient than play doh.