dry ice

[ygmir]

We Americans with our refrigerators. Gawd, are we all drugs or something, and we're producing global warming like crazy, and it's like killing us with climate change, and we have no clue how to change. There has to be a better way.

So you've all just convinced me not to take any ice or cooler at all this year.

Canned vegetables. Powdered milk. Muslie. Dried fruit. Dried or caned meat. Nuts. Dates. Rice. Spaghetti. Crackers. Tea. And room temperature water. Like the pioneers and Indians who traversed the the black rock desert before us.

...And I'll have a great time and it will be much cheaper and with less head aches, and no chance of food spoilage. If I need to cool down I can wrap myself in a wet towel.

[Elliot]

Hot ziggity! I just read thru this entire thread -- all six pages back to 2004! Much good info.

Now... I did read a bit fast, so I may have missed a word or two. But I did not see any mention of... using an old household refrigerator or freezer to keep the Dry Ice in. I can grab an old fridge free from my neighbor, and I'm thinking of removing the mechanism and using it as a Dry Ice Depository. Might lay it on its back like a chest freezer. Even has two compartments -- one for Much Rock Solid Dry Ice, and one for ice cream. Granted, not everyone could do this, but I have a big trailer to haul it on.

Thoughts?

(And yes, I am familiar with the basics of dry ice, having used it at work many years ago.)

[ibdave]

Hot ziggity! I just read thru this entire thread -- all six pages back to 2004! Much good info.

Now... I did read a bit fast, so I may have missed a word or two. But I did not see any mention of... using an old household refrigerator or freezer to keep the Dry Ice in. I can grab an old fridge free from my neighbor, and I'm thinking of removing the mechanism and using it as a Dry Ice Depository. Might lay it on its back like a chest freezer. Even has two compartments -- one for Much Rock Solid Dry Ice, and one for ice cream. Granted, not everyone could do this, but I have a big trailer to haul it on.

Thoughts?

(And yes, I am familiar with the basics of dry ice, having used it at work many years ago.)

I did just that my 1st year. Old Freezer laid on its back, turned into a chest type freezer with dry ice.. Worked great.....

[hunter S]

Ice Cream?.......Did you say ICE CREAM?

[Elliot]

I did just that my 1st year. Old Freezer laid on its back, turned into a chest type freezer with dry ice.. Worked great.....

Glad to hear it, because I just grabbed that ole 'fridge, stripped it and cleaned it; and perched it, tentatively, on the front of my new trailer.



Ice cream? All week long, if this works!

[gyre]

Fuck that.
Some people bring working full size refrigerators out there.
One of my more surreal experiences is opening a fridge after two weeks out there and the being blinded by the light.
Close the door and back in the desert!

[Funky Monkey Mech]

somebody i camped with last year did that took an old freezer loaded it with dry ice and ice cream and then we handed it all out on i think it was Friday..... apparently he has done that in years past.... Coolest thing i heard about but did not get to see is apparently somebody out there last year was making ice cream on the playa with a machine or something that used liquid nitrogen to chill and or flash freeze it..... wish i could have found it....

[Elliot]

Some people bring working full size refrigerators out there.

Not a bad idea! I'd drag my kitchen fridge out into the bus in a flash, but I'm trying to minimize use of my generator.

I do expect to have my little RV fridge running off a bunch of deep cycle 12 V batteries. But I'm too lazy to do the research and calculations, so the RV fridge will be a matter of however-long-the-batteries-last, and then I'll... know more about it for next year.

[willyloafofphora]

So you take two coolers and you fill one with dry ice and freezer bags full of tamales and the other with beer or whatever you need to keep cool. Every day you take a bag of tamales and put it in the beer cooler they will keep it cool all day long. At night you cook the thawed tamales and put another bag in the beer cooler. Tamales make great ice packs and their delicious.

[goathead]

Coolest thing i heard about but did not get to see is apparently somebody out there last year was making ice cream on the playa with a machine or something that used liquid nitrogen to chill and or flash freeze it..... wish i could have found it....

That was I Scream Nation. They did a great job, just a bowl, wooden spoon, make their ice cream base. Stir, add a little liquid nitrogen, stir like hell, add a little more, stir like hell again. It froze quick, and was really tasty.

[Elliot]

Yeehah! Did ya see those "heat devils" spinning off the Temple Burn?!

I bought 200 pounds of dry ice Saturday August 23. To my surprise, it turned out to be in bulk -- pellets around half inch in diameter. I was in a hurry, so I didn't ask if it was food grade, but perhaps it was since he normally sells it to wineries. So he just shoveled it into my dead refrigerator's main compartment.

We kept the big door mostly shut, and we put frozen water jugs and food in the former freezer compartment. And ice cream, yes -- some in each compartment. Worked great. But only until around Wednesday, when we had to start putting the food directly in with the DI. And Thursday or Friday we had to start making daily trips to Arctica.

I figure that if I build a plywood and styrofoam box around the fridge, and put a shade awning over it, the 200 pounds might make it all week.

Oh... it cost 88 cents per pound (this price for quantity of 100 to 300 pounds.)

So.... Anybody else have experience with DI pellets?

[BetaBox]

I borrowed about 40lbs of dry ice from work and put it in one of the 5 day coolers from costco. the dry ice lasted from sunday to thursday. I ended up gifting about 20 half frozen popsicles on friday. Some people actually handed popsicles back to me cause they were a little squishy, even though they were still on the stick. It was even those creamy coconut ones. People are funny......

Next year i am getting 50 lbs of dry ice and mixing it in with my food stuff the night before i take off. Then, the next morning as we are heading out of town, i'll re-up the dry ice. What happened was that the stuff in my freezer was way too warm and sublimated too much of the dry ice. If the frozen stuff and the dry ice are allowed to reach equilibrium, then you add dry ice, your freezer will be much happier.

[staree]

Hey!

post playa now ... and we got dry ice for the 1st time ... it was great but tricky.

We bought it at the safeway ... just in front of the Walmart on McCarran in Reno. The nice lady at walmart said "all the grocery stores have it"

lined the cooler with foil ... had a large cooler ... 3 large blocks of dry ice.

It froze our shit SOLID .... our apples were frozen like it was science class ... my yogert was a brick ... my redbull exploded... i think we bought too much. It lasted us 6 days - but the freezing ruined a bunch of our food.

Next year i think we are getting a small cooler for house the dry ice and to freeze solid some gatorades and waters that can handle it... and transfer into the big cooler as the week goes by. Tricky but i think it was worth it


:)

[Elliot]

Staree, thanks for a good laugh -- no offense intended!

You are not supposed to put things like fresh apples and canned beverages in with the dry ice. Most of us didn't know this either -- until we invested a bit of time in reading this thread and the information in the links at the front of the thread.

What you do, is "transfer some of the cold" gradually to your foods and beverages that require refrigeration. A common way to do this is to freeze jugs of water (like milk jugs) in the dry ice, and then put this "wet" ice with your food.

Now... Frozen foods like ice cream can be put directly in with the dry ice, but may then take several days to thaw out enough to be eaten! There is also the issue of the carbon dioxide making some foods taste goofy. Somebody mentioned that carbonated milk can be a strange experience.

All right, we have our annual exploding soda can story. Hope you enjoyed your burn anyway!

[Elorrum]

I haven't used refrigeration for food the last two years. I bring canned goods, salty snacks, and many small baggies of trail mix, which work for breakfast, lunch etc. I do enjoy a cool beverage, so ice has been for ice water only, and to preserve leftovers for the next day. I don't use loose ice, have kept it all containerized, to drink later as it melts. This year, I bought some square 5 liter water containers, since last year, the empty one and two liter soda bottles were hard to contain and just collected more dust as trash/reclyables. I found out: 24 hrs is not long enough to freeze 5 liters of water. I had two small coolers and no cold water by Wednesday. My appreciation for a cold soda hit the heights this year. This actually was kind of nice, made me real grateful. I also l ate up the leftovers before doing dishes. I'm wondering if this is an element of ettiquette for the playa only: If your host/hostess has no refrigeration, please help finish the dinner. What is an extra couple spoonfuls of soup? I hate wet garbage. Last year I lined and wrapped my coolers with reflectix, and kept one totally sealed until later in the week. This worked well. This year I ran out of time, and figured I'd roll with what I had. I know that cold water stays cold in your cooler better than cold air which gets released everytime you open the cooler, so draining your cooler is going to cut down your total effective cool time. I would keep my goods waterproofed, or on a shelf/pan above the water level.

[Intubater69]

I had both a Coleman 6 day cooler and an older igloo. I put a space blanket inside the igloo to wrap the food/etc with. I used both with 3 gal. frozen water, or the blocks from artica. I placed both upon 2x4s and covered with a silver tarp. I put a wireless temp gauge in each to monitor internal temp. In the morning both were around 33-34 degrees and would climb during the day into the low 40's. Overall, I was impressed, but next yr, I'll wrap both with reflectix, and 1 will get dry ice, LOL, and ice cream

[chiefdanfox]

We used one of those Coleman 6 day coolers with a twist:
We placed the mix of block and crushed ice (crushed to help with the fit) INSIDE of a river bag, and placed the non-crush-able food on the bottom, and stacked the rest, like eggs, around the sides of the bag. We had maybe a cup of melt water in the cooler, if combined from all week.

We never had to dump the cooler, and the food stayed cold, steaks frozen until Thursday (pre frozen at home, of course), nothing spoiled, no leaky "coleman stew" to deal with. We had another IC for beer, drinks, and we showered with the melt water from that cooler and the river bag.

I brought a 55 gallon drum for grey water, went home with maybe 15 gallons from our shower. No evap pond, pumped it out into lake tahoe on the way home. DOH! Actually pumped it into my sewer, via a clean out.

[Elliot]

The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that my bulk pellets were all wrong. The total surface area must have been enormous, and with no wrapping to reduce air circulation against that surface. I bet, if I had instead used the same weight of the more common blocks wrapped in wax paper, it would have lasted the whole week and then some.

The issue, methinks, is what exactly happens in that "atmosphere" inside the box. When we close the lid after putting the DI in, it's mostly air, and it's moving around a bit. Slowly the air is then replaced by CO2, a slight pressure builds up, and excess air/CO2 is vented thru the inevitable tiny gaps here and there. What's really in there, and going on in there, after a day? 99% CO2? Circulation caused by the "boiling" of the DI into CO2? Thermosyphon circulation?
Once I understand some of that, perhaps I can make improvements. I think somebody mentioned... filling empty space with blocks of styrofoam or some such.

Thoughts? Knowledge? Reasonably coherent theories?

[gyre]

Magic?

I mix water based ice and have never noticed vapor.
Maybe there's a connection?

[cullen]

it's easy to make fresh ice cream. so long as you have access to ice and salt and a coffee can.

you can find a recipe on line, but just fill a ziploc bag half way with the mix seal add ice and salt to the coffee can add the bag and top off with a little water and more ice and salt. put the lid and play roll the can. drain when the ice melts and add more ice and salt.

took us about 20-30 minutes kicking the can around.

[Sail Man]

Chief, when you mention a river bag, are you referring to those waterproof style gear bags?

I have a couple of the roll top then buckle types, would these work?

[Elderberry]

it's easy to make fresh ice cream. so long as you have access to ice and salt and a coffee can.

you can find a recipe on line, but just fill a ziploc bag half way with the mix seal add ice and salt to the coffee can add the bag and top off with a little water and more ice and salt. put the lid and play roll the can. drain when the ice melts and add more ice and salt.

took us about 20-30 minutes kicking the can around.

Very clever.

JK

[mdmf007]

sounds like a fun project

[Oldguy]

What you'll need:

1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup milk or half & half , or a can of condenced milk, or cream
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
6 tablespoons rock salt , or salt pellets
1 pint-size plastic food storage bag (e.g., Ziploc)
1 gallon-size plastic food storage bag
Ice cubes

How to make it:

Fill the large bag half full of ice, and add the rock salt. Seal the bag.
Put milk, vanilla, and sugar into the small bag, and seal it.
Place the small bag inside the large one, and seal it again carefully.
Shake until the mixture is ice cream, which takes about 5 minutes.
Wipe off the top of the small bag, then open it carefully. Enjoy!

Tips:

A 1/2 cup milk will make about 1 scoop of ice cream, so double the recipe if you want more. But don't increase the proportions more that that -- a large amount might be too big for kids to pick-up because the ice itself is heavy.

You can use salt pellets for water conditioners in the gallon icebag and sweetened condensenced milk from a can in the baggie. You can use real cream also.
For sherbet or sorbet, just use fruit juice instead of milk products.

[chiefdanfox]

Chief, when you mention a river bag, are you referring to those waterproof style gear bags?

I have a couple of the roll top then buckle types, would these work?

Yep. Exactly the type we used. The bag was about like two ten pound potato bags, or two bear cans stacked end on end. Understand that the over all storage capacity was ideal for two dudes with big appetites. Had we three dudes, then we might have been reduced to cannibalism, if we wanted fresh or fresh-frozen meat. (this is why you should always have toe clips on yer bike. you never kno when you have to peddle wif one leg)

[Elliot]

About the ice cream.... In case the young folks don't understand.... In the old days, people routinely made ice cream this way -- but in a mass produced appliance that was cranked by hand. Kicking or tossing it around is just a more fun way to do the vigorous mixing.

Now somebody else explain the chemistry of it, please.

[ygmir]

the salt allows the ice to melt at a lower temperature, so, it's liquid, but at or below freezing.
liquid transfers heat better than ice cubes.
so, the heat is removed from the cream/sugar/flavor mix and allowed to lower in temp to or near freezing........ rolling it around just mixes it for better consistency even freezing.

Is that what you're asking?
chemistry and physics there.......

[Elliot]

Yes, that must be it. Salt is used to melt ice on roads -- duh.

Supercold water, and off you go.

[Sail Man]

Chief, when you mention a river bag, are you referring to those waterproof style gear bags?

I have a couple of the roll top then buckle types, would these work?

Yep. Exactly the type we used. The bag was about like two ten pound potato bags, or two bear cans stacked end on end. Understand that the over all storage capacity was ideal for two dudes with big appetites. Had we three dudes, then we might have been reduced to cannibalism, if we wanted fresh or fresh-frozen meat. (this is why you should always have toe clips on yer bike. you never kno when you have to peddle wif one leg)

Note to self: Add river bags to inventory, add toe clips to bike

[CompositionB]

I don't know if anyone has suggested this yet or not but the best place to get dry ice here in Tucson is at an ice cream wholesaler called "Excel Ice Cream."

Apparently that's how the ice cream trucks stay cool. They must move enormous amounts of the stuff because their price is more than $1 per pound less than Safeway.