Too tired to cook delicious meals after work? Try this prep method to up your dinner game and make dinner faster!
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Mustering up the energy to cook anything more than Mac and Cheese after a hectic day can sometimes feel like a heroic act. With a little bit of pre-planning, you can speed up your cooking by cutting out the need to peel and cut common ingredients like onions, celery, or bell peppers.
What is Flash Freezing?
Flash Freezing in terms of home use refers to freezing pieces of food individually on a baking sheet then preserving them in the freezer in an air tight container. This allows you to grab smaller amounts of whatever item you froze without it all sticking together. For dinner, then, you can measure out a cup of diced onions in no time!
How to Flash Freeze:
You will need:
–Parchment paper (optional)
-Freezer large enough to store your baking sheet
First, cut up whatever ingredients you would like to freeze. I usually cut a bag of onions or a whole stalk of celery at a time so I only have to cut once. Dice up your ingredients and spread them out in a single layer across the parchment paper on you baking sheet. Parchment paper is optional, however, I prefer to use this for less sticking to the pan.
For reference, one 3# bag of onions typically makes 2 baking sheets and one celery takes one sheet.
Once you have everything cut and spread out on the baking sheet, place this in the freezer for 1-2 hours. Make sure you freeze it mostly flat to avoid the pieces from sticking together at one end of the sheet.
After 1-2 hours (or longer if you’re like me and forget about it!) pull out your sheets and pour the frozen pieces into a gallon sized freezer ziplock or any other kind of air tight container. Now, when you need a cup of diced onion for your dinner recipe you can pull out your frozen bag of onions, and be on your merry way!
A Word About Bell Peppers:
Bell peppers are another common ingredient you can flash freeze to make cooking dinner faster. However, I do find that these seem to get freezer burn much faster than onions and celery. I recommend using these within 1 month of cutting them up if you want to avoid freezer burn.
The best way to cut up bell peppers to freeze them is to julienne them lengthwise instead of dicing them. This works best because some recipes (fajitas) use long strips of bell peppers while other recipes (egg bakes) typically use diced peppers. If your recipe requires diced peppers, you can easily break the long strips of peppers into smaller pieces with your hands for a no mess, no dishes solution!
How Does Flash Freezing Help Make Dinner faster?
Flash freezing common ingredients saves you dishes (knife and cutting board), time (everything is already cut!), and frustration (only cry once, not every night while you cut onions!).
Can Flash Freezing be Used for Anything Else?
Flash Freezing can be used on berries and cut fruits to make smoothies and pies at a later time! This can be a great money saving technique if you buy berries when the prices are low in the summer and freeze them for later in the year when they are out of season. However, this requires that you have a large enough to fit this kind of storage.
Do you already use flash freezing in your kitchen? Have you tried freezing any other ingredients? Let me know what worked for you!