Our freezers can be a secret weapon when it comes to meal planning – Kate Hall shares her tips and advice for utilising yours when batch cooking or cutting down on food waste
Let’s be honest, at some point we’ve all had a freezer that’s half-full of almost empty boxes, or we’ve frozen something in such a big portion it has taken three days to defrost fully in the fridge. We can better use the space that we have, defrost foods faster and enable ourselves to only use as much as we need.
Far too often our freezers become somewhere where we sling leftovers and shop-bought fodder with little thought for locating (or even identifying) the contents later. This results in us simply not making good enough use of this genius bit of kit.
My ‘freezer stash’ is best described as a filing cabinet of frozen ingredients. It is organised with ease of access in mind, with clear labels, and consistent ‘containers’, so that everything has its place and can be found when needed with minimal effort.
STORAGE SOLUTIONS
I prefer to use freezer bags (not sandwich bags – these are far too thin!) instead of tubs, glass jars and even silicone or PEVA freezer bags as they take up far less space and so you can fit more food in your freezer.
What I like about the Ikea bags (see p71), is that they come in a variety of sizes and have a coloured band across the top, which is perfect for labelling. By writing across the top of the bag (instead of on the front), it’s far easier to flick through your bags to find what you need, and if you write on this strip with a permanent marker it will stay labelled in the freezer, but can also be washed off if you soak the bag a bit in warm soapy water (although your writing may wear off particularly well-loved bags). Bags can easily be relabelled if necessary (just wipe the top strip dry before re-writing your label).
The stiffness of the bags ensures that they can also be fully turned inside out when washed and stood up on a clean tea towel to fully dry out, with no need to hang them over anything. This for me is key to making sure that I actually reuse the bags. To store them, I simply group the same-size bags together, fold them in half and place them inside another bag of the same size. All of these ‘bagged’ bags then go inside one large bag and live in a kitchen drawer.
Because most of the foods I freeze are open frozen, rather than flat frozen, I find the bags last very well and any that do break, I wash and then put into soft plastic
