10 Freezer Hacks — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] So for most of my adult life, my freezer was basically a food cemetery. Food went in with good intentions, and then six months later, I'd find it covered in freezer burn and have to throw it away. But over the last few years, I have completely changed how I use my freezer,

[00:13] and instead of treating it just as long-term storage, it's become by far the most useful tool in my kitchen, helping me waste less food, cook faster, save money, and eat healthier. And in today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you 10 freezer systems and hacks that I honestly wish I knew years ago,

[00:29] because I truly believe your freezer might just be the most underutilized tool in your kitchen. And starting things at the number one slot, we've got compound butter cubes. And in a previous video, I showed you my ginger scallion oil,

[00:41] which I freeze into these little cubes, so anytime I need a little burst of flavor, I grab one straight from the freezer and instantly upgrade everything from fried rice to noodles. But another flavor bomb I always keep stocked is compound butter.

[00:54] And obviously, I'm not reinventing the wheel here. Compound butter is just a flavor butter. I'm sure you've made it before at some point in your cooking journey, but the simple act of freezing it completely changed how often I use and make it.

[01:07] Because one of the main problems I find with making compound butter is you're committing a lot of effort to one flavor. And we all get bored of things eventually, but when it's frozen, I can make a big batch and use it over the course of months without worrying about waste.

[01:21] For this specific compound butter, I just took a little trip to the garden and basically picked whatever fresh herbs I could find this time of year. and I chop them up nice and fine. And I'm using one cup of salt and butter here, and I'm going to grate in one clove of garlic,

[01:34] and I'll add in all those chopped herbs and just give everything a good mix. And the real key here is using silicone molds, which is going to make the demolding process of the cubes much easier. And these are two tablespoon molds, which I find makes a nice little portion size.

[01:48] I'm going to freeze the cubes overnight, and once they're frozen, then I'll transfer them to any type of food container or freezer bag for longer-term storage. And then all I need to do for a wonderful little flavor bomb, pop out one of these herbaceous aromatic butter cubes from the freezer,

[02:03] and you have one of the easiest ways to make a very simple meal taste way more impressive.

[02:15] Now coming in at the number two spot on this list are green smoothie cubes. And if you watched my breakfast cube video, I showed you my chocolate banana smoothie cube. All you have to do is add milk and blend and you have an instant snack or breakfast.

[02:29] My kids absolutely love these because they taste a little bit like a treat. They're actually pretty healthy and fairly filling. But another instant smoothie cube that sort of satisfies a different necessity in my meal prep are these ringing smoothie cubes, which, by the way, are a fantastic option for using up any greens if they're about to go bad.

[02:47] You can use spinach, kale, chard, or really whatever greens you have on hand. My spinach in the garden was actually starting to bolt, So I had to pick a bunch of that and I had plenty of kale growing. So those became the base of this green cube.

[02:59] And from there, it's really up to you to pick your flavor profile. I'm going in the tropical direction with some mango, kiwi, and a little ginger. So I'll slice up the mango and the kiwi and I'll give a rough peel to the ginger and I'll toss all of that into the blender.

[03:13] Then I'm going to pack in all of my washed greens and blend them until they are completely smooth. Since greens can be a bit fibrous, I like to blend them really well so the finished smoothie cube has a nice silky texture. And I find that these half-cup cube molds make the perfect single-serving portion.

[03:28] All you have to do is pop out one cube per person, making ratio super easy when you're making multiple smoothies at once. So now, whenever I want a quick snack or a healthy breakfast, I drop a cube or two in the blender. I do like adding a fresh banana for some extra sweetness and creaminess.

[03:42] And then I'll pour in my milk of choice. This right here is some homemade almond milk. And then all I have to do is blend until smooth. Wow. Now moving right into the number three spot, we have marinara sauce cubes.

[03:58] And if you've watched these videos, you know I grow a ton of tomatoes every single year. And preserving them is absolutely essential to my family's survival through the winter. Because not much in the kitchen can beat a summer tomato in like January or February.

[04:11] And I do a lot of jarring or canning, but another way I preserve them is by cooking them down and just freezing them in pine containers, which is great for long-term storage, but it's not really a hack. The real hack I found is turning those tomatoes into a marinara sauce and

[04:25] freezing them in the cube. So I'll start with my tomatoes. These actually happen to be my last two pints of frozen tomatoes from last season, which I'm going to let thaw out, but of course you can use any canned tomato product that you like. Then I'll dice up some onion and garlic and I'll cook

[04:40] them in some oil until they are soft and lightly caramelized And I add in those tomatoes and just let everything melt and cook down And once everything combined I going to use my immersion blender to blend everything smooth which is my personal preference and definitely my kids preference

[04:54] Then I'm going to add some salt and I'm just going to cook down the tomato sauce until I get the proper sauce consistency I'm looking for, which is right at this point. And I like dumping the sauce into these half cup silicone molds, which I'm going to freeze overnight.

[05:08] And once the cubes are frozen, you can definitely just store them all together in a freezer bag. But if you want to really preserve them long term, I would definitely recommend vacuum sealing the cubes, which of course goes for everything you're going to see on this list today.

[05:21] And now this is where the real magic happens. My favorite use is what we call pizza noodles in our house. I'll cook up some pasta, save a little bit of that pasta water, and I'll toss in one or two of these marinara cubes, depending on how much pasta I have.

[05:33] And then I'll add a splash of that pasta water, which is going to help that sauce melt down. Then I'll throw those noodles back in. I'll give everything a toss together, making sure to really let that sauce cook and absorb into the pasta.

[05:45] Then I'll turn off the heat, immediately grate in some fresh Parmesan, and give everything a nice mix. And boom, dinner is basically done. Yeah. Alright, so coming in at the number four spot, we have these lemon ginger honey cubes.

[06:01] And one of my favorite discoveries that started all of these freezer drinks for me It was last summer when I grew way more cucumbers than I knew what to do with them. Obviously, I made a ton of pickles. And then after that, I just started juicing them fresh and freezing that juice into cubes,

[06:14] which ended up becoming the best homemade hydration drink. Whenever I wanted a refreshing drink, I'd drop one into a glass of water or I'd top one in my water bottle for just an instant hydration water. And that got me thinking more about concentrated drink cubes.

[06:28] And these lemon ginger honey cubes have become one of my favorites. And the ingredients are right there in the title. Lemon, ginger, and honey. That's it. First I'm going to juice up a bunch of lemons and some fresh ginger. If you're feeling ambitious, you can chop off the skin of the lemon.

[06:41] But if the produce is organic and it's clean, I'm usually too lazy and I just run it right through the juicer for a little extra vitamins and nutrients. Then once I have my lemon ginger juice, to really balance all that tartness and intensity from the ginger,

[06:53] I'll stir in my honey and then this juice gets poured into a medium sized silicone ice cube mold and into the freezer goes. And then once these cubes are frozen, I'm obviously not going to vacuum seal them because that would just not be very efficient.

[07:06] So I transfer them over to a food container and I pop that into the freezer so I have easy access for whenever I want a special little drink. Here we go.

[07:33] Ooh, that's nice. Now, freezing food is absolutely essential to how my family eats year-round, and the last thing I would want is to lose any of this work we put into preserving it, which brings me to the sponsor of this video, Jackery.

[07:46] And this is the Jackery Fridge Guard, which just launched, and it's a really clever and simple system that protects your food during power outage. The unit's super thin and only weighs about 25 pounds, so you can keep it next to the fridge, inside a cabinet, or just right on top of the fridge itself.

[08:00] But what's really cool is the system both combines a UPS and a 1 kWh backup battery into one device. The setup is incredibly simple. You just plug it into the wall and plug your refrigerator right into it,

[08:12] And if the power does go out, backup power kicks on in under 10 milliseconds, keeping your fridge running with basically no interruption. And we're spending a ton of time and energy preserving hundreds of pounds of food from the garden each year.

[08:27] And I have a few different refrigerators and freezers here at the studio, keeping that food good year round. But the problem is we get a lot of forms here on Long Island. So for me, this system is basically refrigerator and freezer insurance.

[08:39] It takes away any of that food loss anxiety. And if you want to check out the Jackery fridge guard and learn more, just click the link below in the description. Alright, so moving right into the number five spot, we have scrap stock. And this one's a classic freezer hack, but it's just so effective that I couldn't leave it off the list.

[08:54] And the system is very simple. I keep a dedicated container in my freezer specifically for stock scraps. I personally love this two-quart Cambro container because it can fit a good amount of scraps to make a full stock,

[09:08] but it can also so easily fit my freezer. and whenever I'm prepping food throughout the week, a lot of the scraps are gonna head straight to the compost bin, but the scraps that would make a good stock, like onion skins, carrot peels, celery ends,

[09:20] herb stems, mushroom trimmings, meat bones, or whatever it is, those go straight into the stock container instead. And then after each time I cook, I just toss that back in the freezer So over the course of a few weeks it slowly gonna fill up with these ingredients that would otherwise be thrown away or composted Now once I collected enough scrap

[09:40] everything goes into a stock pot. I cover with water, simmer it for a few hours, drain it off, add a little salt and that's it. You just turned your food waste into a flavorful homemade stock. And then of course if you want you could reduce that down and make scrap stock cubes. That's

[09:56] to be a great option for just some convenient flavor to pull out of the freezer and use to flavor up any of your meals. Now speaking of turning excess produce into freezer gold, number six on this list is pesto cubes and this one falls in that category of just a quick instant meal

[10:12] similar to the marinara cubes and it's sort of a must for any gardener out there because pesto freezes very well and at some point during peak harvest season you're almost guaranteed to have more greens or herbs than you know what to do with. And the real trick here is to stop thinking about

[10:27] pesto as just basil pesto. You want to think of it more as a pesto formula where you've got your green base, your nuts, your aromatics, your acid, your oil, and maybe some cheese. Once you understand

[10:40] that formula almost any abundance in the garden can become a pesto. Right now for me in the garden garlic scapes are popping off which are those long tender shoots that grow from the garlic plant right before it flowers, and every year I remove them to focus all the energy on growing bigger

[10:55] bulbs. And a fun fact which I just learned this year, if you pull them extremely slowly and carefully you can get a much longer garlic scape by removing the inside tender section from the stalk. Oh my god, I've been missing the most tender delicious part of the garlic scape this

[11:11] entire time. That's crazy. Now to bulk things up I'm also adding some kale and spinach from the the garden and everything gets washed and I do prefer to blanch all of these ingredients which is going to soften the greens. It's going to help preserve the color and make for a much smoother

[11:26] pesto and I'm using pistachios as my nut of choice which I'm also going to blanch briefly as well. Then everything gets thrown in some cold water. I'll squeeze it dry and I'll add it to my food processor. I'll squeeze in a few lemons for my acidity. I'll add some salt and pepper and since

[11:40] garlic scapes already bring plenty of garlicky flavor there's no need for any extra garlic in pesto then I'll blend everything together while slowly streaming in olive oil until it's smooth and creamy and from there it's into the silicone mold and off to the freezer and just like the

[11:54] marinara cubes I do prefer to vacuum seal these pesto cubes so I can have that amazing freshness throughout the entire winter.

[12:16] Moving on to freezer hack number seven, which is frozen minced garlic. So you just saw how I turn the garlic face into pesto every single year. But once all of that garlic actually bulbs up and is ready to harvest and cure,

[12:29] I'm always thinking of creative ways to preserve it. And this one comes from a short video I did on five different ways to preserve garlic. It absolutely kicks ass. It has become a staple in my kitchen that we pretty much have year round.

[12:41] The only annoying part about this, by far the most time consuming thing, is peeling the garlic. And there's a bunch of different hacks out there just for peeling garlic. Two metal bowl thing never really worked that well for me.

[12:53] If you do have a good garlic peeling hack that's worked for you, please comment in below. But once your garlic is peeled, the rest is very simple. You're gonna throw it all in a food processor, and I like using a smaller one for this. And I pulse it together until it looks like you've basically spent way too much time

[13:07] garlic by hand. Then I'll dump all that garlic right into a larger freezer bag. And the next part is kind of fun. You're just gonna flatten it out by hand into a nice even sheet. Then I'm gonna use a chopstick to draw a grid which is gonna

[13:19] help portion out these little cubes after they're frozen. And I found that a one and a half inch cube is a pretty good portion size for this minced garlic. Then I'll place the bag on a tray to keep it flat and I'll freeze it overnight. And just take a

[13:31] second to think about how many times you spend to mince that amount of garlic each time you're prepping a meal over the next few months. Instead of pulling out your cutting board, mincing it up, having it smell intensely like garlic, you can just grab one of these minced garlic cubes

[13:44] and toss it straight in the pan and you're done. And honestly, now that I think about it, this hack would work really well for your grater taste as well if you do a lot of Indian cooking, which I certainly do. All right, coming in at the number eight spot is instant Vietnamese pho.

[13:57] And in a recent cube video, I did an instant ramen cube, which is a recipe that I absolutely love. And when I have those cubes on hand, it makes bringing together a nice bowl of Japanese noodles so easy.

[14:09] But I'm always looking to change up flavors and cuisines. So this is just a really easy technique to have an instant pho broth on hand So to get that traditional grill flavor I doing all the prep for this pho on my grill So first I just gonna pop my stock pot right on the grill and I adding my whole spices right to the bottom of the pot to start toasting them up a bit

[14:27] And that morning I picked some fresh garlic and green onions from my garden, which are going to be the fresh aromatics, along with some ginger, which I'll just throw right onto the grill to start charring up a bit. And for the real base of this stock, I'm using a few chicken carcasses,

[14:40] and I have a few z-stones, which I'm also going to be grilling up for extra flavor. And once those spices are toasted up and smelling nice, I'm going to add the charred aromatics right into the pot. And then I'll remove the entire pot from the heat to really focus on getting some delicious flavor out of those bones.

[14:55] And once those are fully roasted and looking great, I'm going to pop those into the pot as well. I'll bring the pot inside, fill it up with water. I'll get it on a low simmer, and while it starts coming up to heat, I'll skim off the top. And once it's looking nice and clean, I'm going to pop a cap on that and just give it a very low simmer for around 16 hours.

[15:13] I let this go overnight. And then the next day, I removed all of the contents from the stock. And I'm going to reduce it down by around 70% to get a nice concentrated stock that will fit into an ice cube mold. Then all I have to do is freeze it overnight, transfer it to a bag or container, and I've got my concentrated instant pho broth.

[15:43] All right, so moving on to number nine, which is a little less of a hack and more of a preservation

[16:03] strategy, I would say, which are vegetables that belong in the freezer. Because a huge part of gardening for me is figuring out how to capture all of that abundance and enjoy it during the colder months. And while I do a lot of different fermenting and canning techniques,

[16:16] over the last few years, we've just put a much bigger focus on freezing a lot of produce because it's not only the easiest preservation technique, but we learned that some foods frozen are just a better option than fermented or canned.

[16:28] Take spinach, for example, one of my favorite crops to grow. And obviously, I'm not going to ferment it or can it, so it's getting frozen. Whenever I'm freezing vegetables, I'm always going to branch them first to preserve their color, texture, and flavor during storage.

[16:41] I'll squeeze out all the excess moisture, I'll portion them into bags, and I'll vacuum seal them. And speaking of vacuum sealing, this is probably a good time to mention my upgrade to a chamber vacuum sealer. I use one of those little handheld ones for a while, and those work fine, but you don't always get the best seal.

[16:57] And this chamber vacuum sealer was definitely a big investment, but it's one of those tools we use almost every day now. The quality of the seal is just dramatically better, which means less freezer burn and a much longer storage life.

[17:10] So that investment for me as someone who preserves a lot of food in the freezer has felt like it's paid off big time. And mushrooms are another great example of something that I'm not going to ferment or can. From my last video, you probably saw just how many mushrooms I've been growing recently.

[17:25] So I took a big batch down in butter until a lot of the moisture evaporated. I blended everything together until I got a nice mushroom paste and I froze that in a cube. And now I've got these incredible mushroom flavor bombs sitting in my freezer. So the other night I threw in one of those frozen garlic cubes in the last half, added

[17:40] in some green onions, popped a couple mushroom cubes out, I even threw in a stock cube, and I had a delicious mushroom-based lobster.

[17:55] Alright, finally we made it to the number ten half, which is simply just freezing leftovers. And this might seem very obvious, because it is, but this has tied the most useful streaker hack on the entire list. You've seen me over the last few months make a ton of videos on these different freezer-cubed meal prep systems,

[18:11] which have been an absolute game-changer for bringing different meals together for me. But this hack is much simpler. Whenever I have leftovers and I'm starting to get tired of them, maybe it's a soup, a curry, some roasted vegetables, it really doesn't matter.

[18:24] The moment I start feeling bored of a meal, instead of forcing myself to eat it, or worse, letting it sit in the fridge until it gets thrown away, I go straight into the molds and I freeze it. And I know this seems so obvious, but I think most of food waste that's happening in your kitchen is because you're just bored of them.

[18:42] But a month from now, that same meal that you weren't feeling might sound absolutely perfect and just hit the spot of exactly what you're craving. So not only is this going to save me time, but it's going to save me money, which really represents why I just have been loving the freezer so much.

[18:57] and treating it much less as just a basic food storage system and more as a tool of analyze and talk about.