Ice: Over-complicating Simple Shit Part 1 – Stank on Ice

In this second entry to “Over-complicating Simple Shit” I make Ice.

As it happens, my freezer here at home started to smell a bit stale. More importantly my ice started to taste bad. So I cleaned the freezer a while ago and hand washed all of my plastic and silicone ice trays. After only a day, that pungent freezer funk was back again. While my mixed cocktails tasted fine, a drink I made with one of my 2″ cubes tasted like complete ass, so I figured I must have done a shit job of cleaning.

I decided to re-clean the freezer, the ice trays and the whole goddamned fridge with baking soda and patted my back for such an amazing job of domestic achievement. All must have been fine after that.

A couple of days later, the unspeakable happened. I filled my Absinthe Carafe with filtered water and small cubes from one of the silicone trays that makes small enough cubes to fit down its neck. The Absinthe diluted from this carafe was… terrible. Luckily it was a familiar brand in an already sampled bottle so I knew to not jump to dire conclusions that it was a bad brand or bottle. 

I went back to the freezer and noticed that ALL of that ever permeating, dank nastiness was coming directly from those silicone trays. Giving them a good, direct whiff, even after yet another cleaning, was still unbearable.

It would seem that my mixed drinks were fine made with ice from the plastic trays, but anything with ice from silicone was vile, so, with a test of Google-Fu, I found an answer that was better than my initial idea of cleaning with baking soda… the answer was actually baking the silicone trays.

I placed the trays on a baking rack over a baking tray lined with aluminum foil just in case I fucked up and melted them, gods know it would have been a bitch to clean. 350 F for 90 minutes did the trick with no goopy puddles of melted polymers. The frosty wretchedness that the trays had absorbed over the years is gone and everything is good.

I go through ice from the plastic trays quick enough that they don’t seem to pick up any of the smell. When I make the silicone tray ice overnight and transfer it to bags for storage. Most sites say to place ice in Freezer bags but I’ve also read that using Paper Bags keeps the cubes from freezing together into giant lumps. After a bit of experimentation, the paper bags do help keep cubes from sticking together but on long term storage they don’t manage to keep out that freezer funk. I’d rather deal with a bit of ice stuck together than ice with unusable flavor so I’ve gone back to freezer bags.

It doesn’t end here, this wouldn’t be under the heading of “Over-complicating Simple Shit” if it were. I don’t know how many of these I’ll do, or how often, but I do figure I’ll post these whenever I get obsessed with certain things in the name of good, clean decadence.

In Part 2 I’ll post about making perfectly clear ice.