5 tips to help you perfectly organise your freezer
Freezers can be an incredible tool when it comes to saving time in the kitchen, avoiding food waste, and saving valuable dollars. But a disorganised freezer can be worse than no freezer at all. After all, if you’re not making the most of your freezer, the money it costs to run are eating into any savings it might be making for you. That’s why we’ve put together a list of some simple things you can do to make your freezer more efficient.
1. Label, label, label
If you’re not labelling the food in your freezer, you’re skipping a simple step that could save you so much time during meal prep. Instead of hunting around, trying to figure out which container has the meatloaf, a sticky label applied to the container or bag before it gets the big freeze eliminates all the fuss.
2. Portion control
There’s something so satisfying about the ability to reach in to your freezer and pull out the perfect amount of meat/sauce/rice for your next meal. Many different plastic bags can lead to a shambles on the shelves, and ends up wasting an awful lot of plastic, which clutters up landfill. So give this a try: fill a zip-lock bag with whatever you wish to freeze – sauce, mince, etc – then break it into single-serve portions inside the bag. When you need a little pasta sauce, open the bag and squeeze one of the portions out. Voila – portion control with a minimum of mess and waste.
3. Categorically organised
If you don’t organise your freezer by food type, you’re missing a handy trick. Try stacking prepped meals on one side, raw meats on the other, berries and dessert together, and bread in the middle. Odds are you’ll always know exactly where to look when you next go to the freezer.
4. Flat-out like a lizard
Instead of trying (and failing) to stack lumpy bags of food – they will fall – take care to lay things down flat to freeze them. Press the food to fill all the space of the bag so that it freezes as flat as possible. Then, you can easily stack them on top of one another, or even vertically inside a basket/container.
5. Vacuum-packed
If you find yourself constantly baffled by what’s in a frosted over container, then it might be worth investing in a vacuum sealer. Aside from locking your valuable food away in an air-tight environment, the plastic’s proximity to the contents makes it laughably easy to see exactly what’s inside. You’ll never defrost the wrong thing again.
Do you already use any of these organisational methods in your freezer? Share your best freezer tip in the comments.
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