Freezer meals: 15 dinners that survive the freezer

What are the best freezer meals?

Chilli, beef ragu, dal, chickpea curry and lentil soup are the 5 best. All 5 are tomato or pulse based, none contains dairy or potato, and each keeps 3 months without any change in texture.

The reason those work is water. Sauces where the liquid is bound into pulses, tomatoes or reduced meat juices have little free water to form large ice crystals, and it is those crystals that break down texture.

The 5 things that freeze badly

Knowing this list saves more disappointment than any recipe. Each of these changes texture in a way that cannot be reversed.

• Potato. Cooked potato turns grainy and slightly sweet. Freeze the stew without it and add potato when reheating, or use lentils instead.
• Cream and yoghurt. Both split into grains and liquid. Freeze the base and stir dairy in after reheating, which takes 30 seconds.
• Cooked pasta. It keeps absorbing liquid and collapses. Freeze the sauce alone and boil fresh pasta, which takes 10 minutes anyway.
• Fried coatings. Breadcrumbs and batter go soft. Freeze them uncooked instead and fry or bake from frozen.
• Anything raw and watery. Salad leaves, cucumber and tomato slices turn to mush as the cell walls rupture.

Components worth freezing on their own

Whole meals are not the only thing worth banking. Freezing components saves more time across a month, because each one removes a step from a dinner you were cooking anyway.

• Cooked mince base. Onion, garlic and browned mince with no liquid. It becomes chilli, ragu or a filling in 10 minutes.
• Sofrito or curry base. Onion, garlic, ginger and tomato cooked down and frozen in ice cube trays. Two cubes is the start of most dinners.
• Grated ginger and garlic. Frozen flat in a bag and snapped off as needed, which removes the most annoying prep job in fast cooking.
• Herb and oil cubes. Chopped parsley, coriander or basil in olive oil. Useless raw, excellent stirred into a finished stew.
• Stock from bones and trimmings. Keep a bag in the freezer, and make stock when it is full.
• Cooked rice, cooled fast and frozen flat. Reheats from frozen in a pan in 4 minutes and fries better than fresh.
• Bread and pastry. Sliced bread, tortillas and puff pastry all freeze with no loss at all.

The curry base cubes are the highest-value item on that list. Twenty minutes of chopping and frying once gives you 15 dinners that start 20 minutes ahead, which is the difference between cooking and ordering on a bad evening.

How do you build a freezer stock?

Do not set aside a day for it. The freezer fills faster and more usefully if every batch you cook produces 2 extra portions that go straight in.

1. 1Double 1 recipe a week. Eat 4 portions, freeze 2. After a month there are 8 dinners banked.
2. 2Use flat containers. A flat 350 g portion freezes in 2 hours and reheats in 8 minutes; a deep tub takes 4 times as long at both ends.
3. 3Label with dish and date. Unlabelled containers become a guessing game and end up thrown out.
4. 4Keep a list on the door. Cross items off as you use them, or you will forget what is in there.
5. 5Rotate monthly. Move anything older than 2 months to the front so it gets eaten.

Reheating without ruining it

Reheating is where a good freezer meal is usually lost. Four habits keep the texture close to the day it was cooked.

• Use a pan, not a microwave, for anything with sauce. A pan reheats evenly and lets you adjust the liquid; a microwave produces hot edges and a cold middle.
• Add a splash of water at the start. Freezing concentrates the sauce, so 2 tablespoons brings it back to the consistency it had.
• Reheat once, until steaming throughout. Repeated reheating is both a food-safety problem and a texture problem.
• Finish with something fresh. Lemon, yoghurt, herbs or chilli oil restores the brightness that freezing dulls, and takes no time.

What about freezing before cooking?

Freezing raw is often better than freezing cooked, because nothing is cooked twice. Marinated chicken, uncooked meatballs, portioned mince and raw cookie dough all come out indistinguishable from fresh.

Marinated chicken is the strongest example. Thighs in yoghurt and spices frozen flat in a bag will marinate as they defrost, so the freezer is doing 2 jobs at once and the result is better than cooking it the same day.

The batch cooking side of this is covered in batch cook for the week, and the shopping in grocery lists from recipes. For the dishes best suited to doubling, slow cooker dump meals and cheap recipes overlap heavily with this list.

On keeping track of a freezer stock alongside a recipe library, ReciBites vs Plan to Eat and ReciBites vs Samsung Food are the 2 closest comparisons.