Frugal Foods to Save in the Freezer

Scoring great deals on foods, harvesting in-season, or baking a double or quad-batch of goodies?  Plan ahead to be even more frugal by freezing them to avoid any food waste (and save some time)!  Follow below to see three easy ways to store your goodies for later use…

 

Bagels and English Muffins

Surprisingly, cold storage of bread products works well if done right!  My family does not eat a lot of bread products, but a cinnamon raisin bagel or sourdough english muffin toasted and slathered with butter on a Sunday morning with coffee is pretty divine…

I digress.  One could just throw a bag of bagels into the freezer and grab them later, but the result is not amazing.  They will be freezer burned, stuck together, and potentially life-threatening to cut while frozen.  (I like all my fingers and blood is not as tasty as butter.)

Begin by cutting the fresh bagels/muffins in half.  (Do not put your finger in the hole!)  Next, place a separator in the middle of each one, be that wax or parchment paper.  Then wrap each one in cling wrap by themselves, and put them back into the original bag.  (You could vacuum-seal the bagels but they will flatten and be dense.)  Into the freezer they go!  When ready, you can pull them straight out of the freezer and toast without thawing.  Easy peasy!

Looking for some of the fun supplies I used?   Look through these links for items I have in my kitchen to help me have fun but stay frugal! *

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Freezing Berries

While it seems very straight-forward to freeze berries, if done wrong, you will ruin the lot.  See below for easy steps to keep you on the right path…

These were purchased on a super sale, but I have done the same process for strawberries and raspberries picked!  First, you need to clean the berries and get them as dry as possible.  Place them on parchment paper on top of a jellyroll or rimmed sheet pan.

Next, put them horizontal into the freezer.  This is usually the hard part in our house, trying to rearrange things to get the tray flat, so items remain spaced out.  Leave it in for at least 2 hours and until the berries are solid, or overnight works great!

Then, you are ready to put berries into a freezer bag for long storage.  Yes, you can use a different vessel, but we reuse our thick plastic bags and like that they change shape as they decrease in volume.  Freezing in this fashion, they berries stay separated and easy to get out!

(Some people may not remember to clean the berries and then particles, twigs, or bugs can hide, and no one wants those in their smoothie nor pie!  Or, if you forgot to use a liner, the berries can stick to the pan and you destroy the berries when removing them.  Or even worse yet, you did the cleaning and the liner but forgot to dry the berries, they got clumped together wet, and you end up with a giant frozen berry mass.   Follow the simple steps above and you will do great!)

 

 

 

Freezing Dough

Along the lines of cook-once-eat-twice, I usually bake in double and quad-batches.  However, my family does not need to be eating a hundred cookies at a time!  So, I like to freeze the dough as that has a better end product than freezing the cookies.  (Although during the holidays, I do both methods to save time and sanity.)

First, make your dough and bake the number of cookies as planned.  For us, I usually only bake 24 cookies unless gifting is planned.   (Why 24?  Because that fits perfectly on two sheet pans in my oven for one round of baking.  That means a lot of dough will be standing by…)

Next, I scoop the dough into balls and freeze them on a Silpat on my pan, like above.  Freeze for a couple of hours or overnight.  Then, the balls go into freezer bags for storage.  Again, into groups of 24 for easy planning when they come out of the freezer!

Look to my website www.KLRestored.com for my Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, coming soon!

 

 

 

* Disclosure: Recommended products are KLRestored home-tested and/or I’d-Buy-That approved.  This post contains affiliate links; we may earn a small commission.  Thank you for support!

 

Edits on 01/10/2023 for updated advertising.