my freezer: a deep dive
I love u cold plastic drawer
A few well-known facts about me. I like cooking elaborate, involved dishes. I like good cuts of meat and peak-season produce. I like spending an hour on my prep then two hours on a slow simmer then five days on working through the leftovers. I like making eight portions of everything. I often hyperfocus so hard that I only come up gasping for air to find out it’s, like, 8.30pm and I need dinner now.
For these myriad reasons and many more, my best friend in the whole wide world is God’s own pause button: the freezer.
By a conservative estimate, roughly a third of my Google searches boil down to “can you freeze [ingredient/dish]”, “how long to keep [ingredient/dish] in freezer” or “how to prep [ingredient/dish] for freezing”. Some of the most easily accessible items in my kitchen are multiple sizes of ziploc bags and their sidekick, a sharpie.
So, wrap up warm, and let’s take a closer look at the icy treasure cave that lives in my kitchen…
The carbs
Good news: if it’s a carb, it likely freezes. Really well.
My quality of life went up significantly when I learned that you can freeze cooked rice; now, a tamago kake gohan is always only a couple of minutes away. If you ever get to dig through my freezer, you’ll find the little pucks slotted into each nook and every cranny.
After every trip to China Town, the bottom of the drawer gets lined with slippery bags of ho fun and cheung fun from Lo’s Noodle Factory, sustaining me for the upcoming weeks and leaving a slick film of oil behind. After particularly ambitious weekends, you may also find bags of handmade noodles and stuffed varenyky there instead.
But of course, there is always bread, so much bread. I cannot sleep at night if doesn’t hold a pack of pitta ready to receive a quick weeknight sardine rillette, at least half a loaf of sourdough for homesick days, yellow-sticker muffins for weekend breakfast extravaganzas, and (not or – and) a garlic flatbread I can magic into a fridge cleanout “pizza”.
The proteins
The staff of my local butchers are by far my biggest haters. I ask for a whole chicken or a big slow-cook cut of meat, and they ask how many for – I say just me, and they squint their eyes suspiciously. They want me to fail! But I have been put on this earth to prove the haters wrong. Nothing can stop my freezer and me, and certainly not a butcher’s doubt that I can body a whole pork shoulder unassisted.
At all times, you will find in my freezer chicken in various stages of cooking, stacked on top of one another in small ziploc bags: raw legs still attached at the joint, ready to be stewed; sliced roasted breast, still in its goo, ready to shine in a sandwich; poached wings, for snacking.
If I’ve been lucky, I may also have a vacuum-packed bag of goat meat that a lady sells for half price at the farmers market when it’s a few days from use by – which may happen once in every other blue moon. On these occasions, I stock up and wait for the perfect time to make a ragù that feeds me for days, and only gets better as time goes on.
Near the goat lady’s stall at the market, there is a fishmonger. So, near the goat in my freezer, there sometimes is half a fish, double bagged and nestled against the side wall. And if, again, I’ve been lucky, it will have yellow sticker meat and fish (minced beef and prawns, usually) to keep it company.
The veggies
Because I contain multitudes, the entire right-hand half of my freezer drawer is a joyous mix of foraged greens and mushrooms, local veggies frozen at the seasonal peak, and, um, bagged veggies from Sainos.
I swear, I replace these with great farm produce as soon as they’re in season. However, I don’t have the room to freeze a whole year’s worth of sweetcorn in the summer. So, throughout most of the year, I bulk up my meal with great fistfuls or supermarket frozen peas, edamame, spinach and corn. Sue me.
In the more granola-girl section of the freezer though, you’ll usually find large bags of sliced leek, a plastic bottle filled with green onions to sprinkle on anything, huge heirloom tomatoes to grate on top of bread for emergencies, an asparagus stash, some blanched cavolo nero, and big chunks of ginger. Currently, some nettles and a chicken of the woods are also guest starring.
The sauces & condiments
This may be an ingredient household, but I will never be caught unprepared for an impromptu apéritif. What is the point of a freezer if you’re not going to use it to hoard several types of hummus (regular, beetroot, caramelised onion), and the aforementioned pitta to go with it? This was a rhetorical question, by the way.
I’m also ready at all times for a meal that looks and tastes like I put a lot of effort into it. Which, to be fair, I did – just a few days/weeks/months earlier. Currently, I’ve got on standby bags of: saag with nettles, chickweed, jack-by-the-hedge and all the market greens I could find to pour over paneer and potatoes; thick romanesco sauce (borderline purée) to mix with equally thick hand-shaped pasta; Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce, to pair with any and everything.
Bonus: The bottom drawer
The top drawer belongs to my flatmate and the middle drawer belongs to me. But underneath these, there is a bottom drawer, half as deep as the others to accommodate the guts of the freezer. For this reason, it remained unclaimed for a while, until my love for the freezing process (see all 912 words above) required me to spread out a bit.
The bottom drawer now proudly holds two of the most important and most miscellaneous components of my frozen collection: ice cubes and stock.
Don’t let the word “collection” fool you – I am, thankfully, still a one-ice-cube-shape kind of person. Although, as spring’s just been, I do currently have a bag of foraged elderflower cordial ice cubes in there. But rest assured, they were made in the exact same tray. However, my boring, cubic, tap water ice cubes allow for the greatest luxuries in life: bottomless iced lattes, daily doogh, cold-brewed tea mocktails, and the occasional G&T.
As for the stock, it’s more of a flat pack situation at the moment. It currently looks like two big ziploc bags filled to the brim, one with vegetable butts (onion, garlic, carrot, courgette, tons of asparagus) and the other with chicken bones, all collected from meals I’ve cooked the past couple of months. But you have to see the vision – once I’ve gathered enough and simmered all of the above in water with herbs and spices for 24 hours, the two bags will sit empty, squashed underneath a litre of deep gold, delicious frozen stock.
Wait, does that count as an ice cube?
PS: On topic
Nicola Twilley, co-host of Gastropod, my favourite podcast, was in the guest chair this week to talk about her upcoming book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, And Ourselves.
Check out the episode to hear about the history of refrigeration, the loser who invented it, the badass female scientist who travelled across the USA with trains cars full of chicken carcasses to give us “use by” dates, and why spraying produce with nanoparticles may (and probably should) replace fridges.