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When you have a busy schedule, cooking dinner every night can be challenging. Yet, to ensure a balanced diet, it’s best to avoid reaching for fast food options too often. That’s where freezer meal prep can help.
Setting aside time to prep healthy homemade meals in advance is a great way to ensure you always have nutritious food choices available, even on busy days. By making freezer-friendly meals, you can more easily stock up on tasty, healthy options and make the most of bulk meal prep by ensuring foods last a long time.
This article will review some helpful strategies, storage methods, techniques, and freezer meal prep ideas to help you strategically plan your monthly menu.
How Long Do Freezer Meals Last?
When planning your freezer meal prep, it’s important to consider how long your chosen meal prep will last in the freezer. In general, freezer meals that are properly stored in airtight containers at 0°F (-18°C) or below can last between 3 and 6 months. The exact amount of time your meal prep lasts in the freezer will depend on the ingredients used, how the food is prepared, and the packaging used to store food.
To ensure food safety, labeling prepped foods before freezing is a good idea, indicating the date the food was stored and how long it will be kept in the freezer. Before reheating your frozen meal prep, check for signs of freezer burn, ice crystals, or strange odors that may indicate the food is no longer at its highest quality.
How to Maintain Food Quality When Freezing
To prevent freezer burn and protect the quality of freezer meal prep, it’s essential to use proper freezer-safe containers such as freezer bags and heavy-duty foil. In addition to using the right materials, you can employ techniques including allowing foods to fully cool before freezing, removing excess air, and wrapping items tightly. This will help maintain texture and protect the food from early spoilage due to ice crystals and freezer burn.
Labeling containers with contents and dates and organizing your freezer can help ensure you eat items in a timely manner. Storing foods in appropriate portions will also ensure you can reheat only the amount you plan to eat so you don’t overheat the unused portions before you’re ready to use them. Finally, maintaining a consistent temperature is key to preventing ice crystal formation and maintaining food quality for meals stored in the freezer.
Effective and Proven Tips for Preparing a Month’s Supply of Freezer Meals
Preparing freezer meals for the month takes some strategic planning, efficient cooking techniques, and proper storage to ensure a well-organized system that will save you time and money. Here are some tips to make the most of your freezer meal prep plans.
Plan Your Monthly Menu
Planning ahead is key when meal prepping in bulk. Consider key factors like flavor preferences, seasonal ingredients, and nutritional balance to help choose which meals to include. As you plan out your monthly calendar, list all planned meals to help determine what you will eat throughout the month and when.
Before you go grocery shopping and make meals, double-check for variety to prevent meal fatigue and ensure your meal plan offers a diverse array of nutrients to support a balanced diet.
Shop Smart, Save Money
Bulk meal prep can help you save money, but to maximize your savings, be sure to plan ahead and shop smart. Cross-reference the recipes you plan to make and calculate the precise quantities of each ingredient you will need to ensure you don’t buy more than you need.
It can also help to keep an eye on what items will be on sale at your local grocery store or even take advantage of wholesale suppliers to reduce the costs of each ingredient.
Prep All Ingredients
There’s no denying that bulk meal prep will take some time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t speed things up by being strategic. To ensure faster cooking, begin by prepping all of your ingredients at once.
Do this by setting up an assembly-line-style workspace with places to chop, measure, and organize your ingredients. Chopping first, then measuring and organizing ingredients per recipe, will save you time as you make each recipe.
Cook Multiple Meals Simultaneously
Much like you can bulk-prep ingredients to save time, similar recipes lend themselves to being prepared together. For instance, you can boil pasta, brown meat, or roast veggies for multiple recipes at once.
In addition to cooking ingredients for similar recipes all at once, you can use many cooking methods at once. While boiling or sauteeing something on the stovetop, you can also use the oven for roasting, cutting down on the overall time spent in the kitchen by efficiently completing multiple tasks simultaneously.
Package For Perfect Portions
When freezing meals, it’s best to plan for the appropriate portions. Reheating frozen foods multiple times is not advised, as it will reduce food quality and potentially impact food safety. So, it’s best to divide meals into family-sized or individual servings based on how you plan to ease each prepped meal.
Label Everything Very Carefully
Labeling is very important for keeping track of everything in your freezer full of a month’s worth of frozen meals. Make sure to write the name of each dish, when it was prepared, cooking instructions, and any dietary notes on the container for each dish. Use freezer-safe labels or tape to ensure the writing remains legible to clearly identify each dish.
Organize Your Freezer Space
Along with clearly labeling everything, organizing your freezer will help ensure it’s easy to find what you need. Arrange your meals in a structure that makes sense for you and your family, such as by category, meal type, or the order in which each meal was prepared.
Organizers like bins or shelf dividers can help keep everything where it should be, making it easier to access desired meals and track what needs to be used or removed from the freezer.
What Are Common Freezer Meal Prep Mistakes?
When you first start freezing your meal prep, it’s easy to make some common mistakes that can impact food safety and quality, ultimately leading to wasted time, money, and food.
Preventing common mistakes in the freezer meal prep process can help prevent freezer burn, ensure better-tasting meals, and help maintain maximum nutrition for your meal prep. Here are a few common missteps to avoid.
Forget To Label Meals
With a busy schedule, rushing the meal prep process and forgetting final details such as labeling meals is easy. However, it may be difficult to remember what’s inside a container or which meals are still safe to eat if it isn’t clearly labeled with the meal name and date. In addition, not including preparation instructions might also leave you unsure of how to reheat food, leading to wasted time or food safety concerns.
Skip Proper Cooling Process
Another common pitfall of rushing is not giving food enough time to cool before freezing. Not letting meals cool fully before freezing can result in temperatures and conditions that promote bacterial growth and can even impact other meals in the freezer by raising the temperature of nearby items.
Overfill Containers When Freezing
Water expands when frozen, so prepped meals are likely to increase in volume during freezing. Overfilling containers without leaving space for this expansion can cause bags or containers to burst. Not only can this create a mess if items aren’t yet fully frozen, but it also compromises the safety of your food.
Neglect Air-Tight Packaging Steps
Excess air can have many negative impacts on your food, including freezer burn, ice crystal formation, and a decrease in food quality. Use proper air-tight freezer bags or containers, and fully remove the air before sealing meals to ensure food stays safe and delicious when you’re ready to reheat it.
Mix Incompatible Food Items
Some foods, like onions and garlic, have a strong odor that can leak into nearby foods when stored too close together. Storing strong-smelling foods near other meals can result in an unwanted transfer of flavors that can impact the taste of your dish. Similarly, foods with different freezing requirements should not be stored in the same container, which can affect how well your meal is preserved.
Meal Delivery Services That Offer the Best Frozen Meals
Preparing your frozen meal prep still takes time and may not always be feasible during those hectic weeks. Thankfully, many popular meal delivery services offer high-quality, convenient frozen meals so you can still feel good about eating and serving your family.
The meal kit companies listed below offer frozen meals that use the same chef-crafted recipes and premium ingredients as fresh meal kits. They use flash-freezing technology to deliver restaurant-quality frozen meals right to your doorstep.
BistroMD
BistroMD specializes in doctor-designed frozen meals that offer balanced nutrition to support various health goals. If you want a well-stocked freezer but don’t have time for a full meal prep session, BistroMD’s restaurant-quality frozen low-calorie meals are a convenient and healthy option.
Home Chef
Home Chef offers an incredibly flexible, customizable meal plan with fresh, microwave-ready, and oven-ready options, perfect for supplementing your frozen meal prep routine. Their menu focuses on home-style cooking using premium ingredients, with portion-controlled servings for families, couples, or single-person households.
Blue Apron
Blue Apron is a longstanding favorite meal kit company due to its great selection of global cuisines and high-quality, sustainably sourced ingredients. They offer an excellent Prepared & Ready plan with chef-designed meals that arrive ready to heat and eat. You can freeze these meals or refrigerate them as you wish.
Nutrisystem
With Nutrisystem, customers receive portion-controlled frozen meals that help support healthy weight management. Their balanced meals combine nutritional science with tasty, satisfying flavors to help provide sustainable results with the convenience of frozen meal kit delivery.
Bottom Line
Preparing a month’s worth of freezer meals can truly transform your approach to serving home-cooked meals without the daily struggle. This strategy for bulk meal prep combines careful planning, efficient bulk cooking methods, and proper storage techniques to create a well-organized system of ready-to-eat meals that offer the nutrition and flavor benefits of home-cooked meals.
Investing in advance meal prep can save you time and money while also ensuring your household enjoys tasty, balanced home-cooked meals every day without all the mealtime stress or temptation to order takeout.
