Cooking in Bulk

Date Posted: January 25th, 2009

A common excuse for not cooking is that cooking for one or two people is difficult and expensive. Most recipes are for four – six servings and even if you scale them down, a lot of times you’re stuck buying more perishable ingredients than you need since they don’t sell parsley by the quarter cup.

Another excuse is that cooking daily is time consuming. You have to buy the ingredients, prepare them, cook them, eat, and then you still have to clean up. When you add up the time it takes to do all this (not to mention picking out the recipe), it ends up being fairly significant. For the busy adult, this may seem like time not well spent.

And yet another excuse for not cooking is that healthy food is expensive.

All of this is nonsense.

The Secret: Bulk Cooking

The secret to cooking healthfully, cheaply, quickly, and for small groups of people is to cook a large batch of food and then freeze the rest. Aaron and I have been doing this for a couple of years and it’s worked incredibly well for us. We eat home-cooked food almost every day, but aren’t tied to the kitchen. Now we have a chest freezer, which makes storage easier, but we used this method when we had a tiny freezer too. It’s really not that dependent on freezer size. Also we have enough different food to choose from that dinnertime doesn’t get monotonous.

The advantages are many:

• Can cook the recipes that serve six or eight people and not waste anything
• No worries about having too many left-over perishables in the fridge
• Serving sizes for frozen dinners are picked ahead of time so you aren’t likely to eat more than you need
• Spend a greatly reduced time at the grocery store and in the kitchen

The cons are few:

• Have to eat reheated food
• Not all meals are conducive to freezing

If this method resonates with you, read on.

Step 1: Pick a Method

If you’re just starting out, chances are your freezer isn’t already stocked with meals that just require heat. To get the full effect of this method you should have several different meals already in the freezer in order to have a variety to choose from at dinnertime. So you have a choice: you can cook several recipes all in one day or you can spend a week cooking a different recipe every day. When Aaron and I started doing this we did the “cook for a day eat for a month” method. Now we tend toward the latter.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. When you’re doing the “cook for a day eat for a month” you only sacrifice one day a month to the kitchen. Plus you can take advantage of buying fresh food in bulk. 10 pounds of tomatoes don’t go bad if you use them right away. It can be fun too. The disadvantages of this method is that it’s really taxing since it’s an all-day affair and it doesn’t work all that well with a small kitchen. Mind you it’s still possible to do with two people in a small kitchen–we did it for months–but you’ll end up using some non-kitchen space and bumping into each other a lot. Also with this method you have to use a cooler to chill the food otherwise you’ll over heat the fridge or the freezer. (We did this once… I don’t remember if any food got ruined, though.) And one more con: it’s not as good for making use of seasonal produce. Some fruits and veggies are in season for less than a month. If you’re cooking only once per month you’ll be missing out of local food at its best.

The more laid back method is great for making use of local food while avoiding burn-out. We started doing it this summer. You can still buy food in bulk, you just do it for one or two recipes instead of five or six. The one con is that you have to cook more often… but eventually your freezer will be so full that you can take a vacation from cooking.

Step 2: Pick Freezer-friendly Recipes

Once you’ve picked a method, you need to pick some recipes. There are several books on this subject already, but I can’t really recommend them. The one that I bought, “Frozen Assets Lite and Easy: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month” was only OK. The advice at the beginning was good, but the recipes (the bulk of the book) were bland and not very appetizing. After a few weeks we started calling it mush. I think perhaps this kind of “lite cooking” is where people got the mistaken notion that The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen by Donna Klein. Virtually all of the recipes in this book are delicious, and make use of the produce grown in the Midwest. Also unlike a lot of vegan books tofu isn’t used as a meat substitute or as a way to make non-vegan food vegan.

As an aside, you may be wondering “Why vegan at all?” The reason is that most cookbooks tend to think of meals as “meat, side dish, side dish”, and this didn’t really appeal to me. I wanted more fruits and vegetables in my diet and vegan (unlike vegetarian which would up my egg and dairy quota more than veggies) would guarantee that I could have plants as my main course.

I can tentatively recommend The Tropical Vegan Kitchen by the same author. I say tentatively because I’ve only cooked a few of the recipes so far. Not enough to form a decided opinion, although so far everything’s been delicious. Also this book uses quite a bit of tofu since much Asian cuisine specifically requires tofu, but this is fine by me since it’s not being used as substitute.

For those who have no interest in trying vegan food I recommend spending some quality time with Alton Brown. You’ll actually learn about how to use different ingredients and how to cook by watching his show, Good Eats, and reading his books. If you’re interested in an objective theory of cooking, this is the place to go.

Some things to keep in mind while picking recipes:

• Potatoes don’t freeze well
• It’s better to cook pasta at the time of serving than to cook it beforehand and freeze it
• Same goes for rice
• Soups are great
• Casseroles too
• Stuffed tomatoes are not so good (bulky and time consuming to prepare)

For more information on how to store different foods check out this book: Stocking Up: The Third Edition of America’s Classic Preserving Guide

Step 3: Double the Recipes

A simple rule of thumb: doubling a recipe isn’t too hard to do, but any more than that and things get tricky. You’ll either need bigger pots or more pots and the chance of burning the food is much greater. And even with doubling it’s good to have a big stock-pot and a big pan or two smaller ones.

Step 4: Freeze the Food

You have a few options for storing the food. You can put them in Tupperware containers or you can put them in freezer bags. Of the two, my favorite method is freezer bags. They stack nicely, are easy to label, are inexpensive, and don’t crack if you leave them in the freezer too long. Believe it or not, they’re great for soups too. Just be sure to get freezer bags instead of storage bags. Storage bags leak, and if you use the reheating method below the food will be watery. The size of the bags matter too. Since there’s only two of us we use the 1 quart bags. That usually is enough food for both of us, often times with a little left over. If you’ve got a large family the gallon bags might make more sense.

We label the bags with the name of the food and the date. Some books tell you to include instructions on how to reheat, but having the name alone is usually enough for.

Once you’ve put the food in the freezer bag the next step is to chill the food. If you’re doing many recipes in one day you’ll DEFINITELY want to use a cooler… filled with ice. Dry-ice is unnecessary. So either put your finished food in the fridge or in the cooler and leave it there until it’s cooled down. Then transfer it to the freezer.

The extent of our freezer organization is that we keep a running tally of what’s in the freezer at any given time. We still have to hunt through the many frozen items, but at least we know that what we’re looking for is in there. It’s really simple to do if you tape a piece of paper and a pencil on a string to the freezer.

Step 5: Reheating

The books will tell you that the best way to reheat is to stick the frozen food you want to eat tomorrow into the fridge today and let it thaw overnight. From my experience this doesn’t work. You have to put it in several days in advance, and then maybe it’ll be thawed by the time you eat it. If you’re anything like me, though, even if putting it in overnight actually worked that’s thinking too far ahead. I want to pick my food now and eat it now.

The solution: microwave. Put the bag of frozen food into a two quarter Tupperware container filled with water and stick it in the microwave for a few minutes. (Why water? Because microwaves work by making liquid water molecules vibrate. Ice crystals don’t vibrate that readily, so surrounding them with vibrating water molecules makes the crystals melt faster.) Once there’s some liquid in the bag empty the water and dump the food into the container. Then stick it in the microwave again stopping periodically the break up the frozen chunks. Yes, the food is in the “danger zone”…. but seriously it’s only for a few minutes. I’ve never gotten even mildly sick from doing this.

And that’s it. Is it more efficient? Yes definitely. You spend less time in the kitchen and at the grocery store than if you’re cooking on a day to day basis. Also you don’t have the problem with spoiling leftovers since the portions in each bag are small enough to be eaten in only one or two days. Is it less expensive? It depends on what your habits are, I suppose. If you’re eating out a lot then it’s definitely less expensive. If you’re buying processed food a lot I imagine it’s also less expensive, but I’m not sure I haven’t done the math. Is it healthier? Most likely. Most of us don’t add things like soy-lecithin or high-fructose corn syrup or all that much salt directly to our food… so it’s probably healthier. Is it practical for one or two people? Absolutely.

Tags: Organization, Physical Health.
Posted at 10:48 am

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