At the time of writing, the contents of my freezer contain a sad-looking, half-empty packet of peas; two jumpers (moths); a randomly filled ice cube tray; and a sliced loaf of bread in a plastic bag with a huge tear in the middle.
Kate Hall’s freezer is somewhat more hopeful.
The drawers are organized by category – dairy, cabinet, bakery, fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, raw meat – and within these categories, individual groups of foods are packed separately in resealable plastic bags. (Hall likes the ones from Ikea, which cost £2 for 25 and are reusable.)
These bags are then labeled and dated. In January, Hall went on the BBC’s Morning Live. When presenter Gethin Jones saw a picture of her freezer, he gasped and said: ‘It’s like a Filofax!’
Hall, 38, is a freezer expert based in Kent. Her Instagram account @the full freezer, where she shares freezing tips, has 68,000 followers. When Hall announced his debut guide, The full freezer methodon social media, it went to number one on Amazon Home Guide’s bestseller list thanks to pre-orders alone.
Hall froze after having her second child. She was wasting ‘so much food’ – and money – and didn’t have time for batch cooking. But she had time to e.g. chop a pepper and put it in the freezer. Soon she started doing this with all the food that was disappearing in her fridge. “It was like finding a magic pause button,” she says.
Kate Hall’s ice trays are filled with things like leftover hummus or coffee. She herself stores eggs, which she has beaten lightly and then poured carefully into the trays
Fascinated, Hall wanted to find out how much she could freeze – and in what ways. So she took a restaurant-level food hygiene course online to learn what was safe and unsafe, and then she froze.
The first trick, says Hall, is to make sure the food is flat when you pack it in the plastic bags – that way it thaws faster and you can make room for more bags in your freezer.
Although a freezer, she cautions, should never be too full: ‘You want it to be about 70 per cent full so it doesn’t work too hard.’ So, for example, a 70 to 100-litre freezer should be filled with approximately one carrier bag’s worth of groceries.
Hall is also strict about how long cooked foods need to cool before you freeze them: most dishes need about two hours, while rice needs an hour. As for optimum freezing temperatures, Hall thinks -18C. And, she says, while food can be stored in a freezer indefinitely, it’s best eaten within three to six months.
Alongside his flat-pack bags, Hall has space to ‘open-freeze’ on trays. She chops bananas or cooked pieces of chicken, ‘open-freezes’ them and pours the result into plastic bags.
Crisps straight from the freezer are nicer than fresh
Ice trays are filled with things like leftover hummus or coffee. Hall herself stores eggs, which she has lightly beaten and then carefully poured into the trays. There is about one egg in every two cubes. Apparently they freeze brilliantly. There you can just see?
Scrambled eggs and hummus aren’t the only strange things inside Hall’s freezer. She keeps peeled, parboiled potatoes, which, when thawed, she fries (a great time-saver for Sunday lunch); lemons (she says frozen ones are easier to peel); stuffed sandwiches she’s made ahead of time (perfect for packed lunches); nuts (for snacks); even crispy.
‘If you have a load of half-eaten chips left over from a party, just put them in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer,’ says Hall.
So don’t pour all the chips into a bowl at room temperature – ‘they go stale very quickly’ – but they’re excellent if ‘you just want a handful on a Friday night with a gin and tonic’.
In fact, says Hall, ‘eating chips straight from the freezer when they’re really cold is, I think, better than eating them fresh. They are so crispy.’ After our interview, I try a frozen crisp for myself. It’s strange at first, but then quite tasty. The only catch is that I very rarely just have a handful of chips. But that’s a problem with me, not a freezing problem.
So what can’t be frozen? Almost nothing, says Hall, although mayonnaise—and any kind of emulsion sauce—doesn’t freeze because it separates when thawed. Other dairy products will also split as the fats separate from the water, but you can combine them again by ‘blitzing in a food processor, heating them up, using them in cooking or sometimes giving them a really good shake’.
Hall also warns against freezing food you haven’t prepared yourself – takeaway, for example – as you don’t know how many times it has been cooked or chilled. (You should only do both once.)
Hall estimates she saves £1,000 a year by freezing food that would otherwise have been thrown away. It is also good for the environment; The UK wastes 9.5 million tonnes of food a year. Some of it ends up in a landfill, where it rots and releases methane.
Humans have been freezing food for a long time. In 1,000 BC Chinese emperors commissioned underground ice cellars so they could store ice and food over the summer.
There are still four old examples in Beijing’s Forbidden City; made of stone, they are about two meters high, 11 meters long and more than six meters wide, with walls that are two meters thick. Hall would love them.
Recently, frozen food has become gourmet. At Waitrose you can buy 200g of frozen miso butter for £3.50. The times calling it a ‘wonder product’ and ‘umami bomb’.
And British brand The Truffle Company sells black winter truffles — the underground kind, not chocolate — that can be shaved from frozen. Yours for £39 per 50 g.
Despite Hall’s Filofax freezer, she insists she’s not perfect. ‘I’m just a person who tries. I’m trying really hard! I find that people tend to have grown up in a household where it’s either, “We don’t waste anything.” Or, “Oh, is that okay? I’m not sure. I’ll throw it away just in case.” And I’m from the latter.’
Freeze it or toss it?
Five foods you can freeze
EGG Crack, whip and freeze. Perfect for baking, omelettes or scrambled eggs.
CRISPS Frozen is crispier and tastier, says Hall.
FLOUR Woodpeckers can hide in flour – but freezing kills their eggs. Eek.
COOKED PASTA Just make sure it’s al dente to avoid mush when defrosting.
CITRUS FRUITS Cut, whole or peeled and segmented.
And five foods you can’t
HARD BOILED EGGS The whites become rubbery. Yuck.
SALAD Freezing salad items separately? Tick. Do you freeze a ready-made salad? Expect softness.
JELLY It gets cloudy and mushy when thawed (but it’s fine to freeze in lollipop molds and eat while frozen).
EMULSION SAUCERS Mayonnaise and hollandaise separate when thawed.
TAKEAWAY LEFTOVERS High risk, says Hall – you don’t know how many times it’s been heated before.
The full freezer method by Kate Hall is published by Ebury, £14.99. To order a copy for £12.74 until March 31, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. free UK delivery on orders over £25.