5 tips and tricks to keep food and drinks cool on a hot summer day
Summer has finally arrived! We can once again spend long evenings enjoying drinks in the park, baking in the sun on the beach or heading out into nature for a delicious picnic. Of course, with all that summer fun, we want to treat ourselves to a tasty chilled snack and drink. But how do you keep your food and drinks nice and cool in that blazing sun? With these tips, you can drink cold beer all day long.
Of course, we all know about coolers and thermos flasks that keep your drinks nice and cold. But do you already know these tricks?
1. Freeze it
Put your bottle of iced tea, lemonade or (my favorite..) Mojito in the freezer the night before. While you’re baking in the sun on the beach, your drink will thaw and you’ll have a wonderfully chilled thirst quencher. An added benefit is that the frozen drinks will also keep all the other food in your bag nice and cool. Just make sure you don’t fill the bottles all the way, because ice expands and you don’t want a swimming pool in your bag! Don’t have much time to freeze your drink? Wrap the bottle in wet kitchen paper before putting it in the freezer, and it will be cold in no time.
2. Dig away
We mostly know the holes on the beach from our eastern neighbors, and now I understand why they do it! Although the top layer of sand is often incredibly hot, it’s actually nice and cool deeper underground. By burying your food and drinks, the sun can’t reach them, so they stay cold much longer! This also works in the park, although the municipality may be less pleased when we all start digging holes there.
3. In the water
There’s nothing I enjoy more than being out on the water. Because my wallet doesn’t allow me to buy a yacht, that usually means a small sloop or electric boat without a fridge. As it turns out, that cold water we seek relief in also works for your food and drinks. Put your beers in a bag, tie a rope to it and lower it overboard—then they’ll stay wonderfully cool for hours.
4. Seawater with ice
Super handy if you’re already at the beach. Fill a bucket with seawater and throw in a bag of ice cubes. Salt water can get much colder than ‘normal’ water without freezing (that’s also why we sprinkle salt in winter). You can sometimes cool salt water down to -22 degrees before it freezes. So your drinks will stay much colder in a bucket of salt water and ice.
5. Aluminum foil
All right, this may be an obvious one, but it does work. Wrap your food and drinks in a thick layer of aluminum foil to keep them cold for longer. What’s important is that everything is already cold—aluminum foil doesn’t cool things down by itself, of course. Just don’t put it in the sun, because then the foil has the opposite effect: it absorbs heat. Naturally, this principle also works with other insulating materials.
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