How to Organize Your Freezer
The freezer is a dark and useful space in your kitchen. It’s a space where a great amount of your food will be stored and saved for future days, weeks, or even months, which means there might not be much rotation of items. Keeping this in mind, it’s important that your freezer is completely organized, in such a way that you can access food quickly and without having to remove everything from the shelves. Keep reading to find out how to properly organize your freezer.
Use bins as drawers
This is not always the case, but some freezers have the shape of a huge, deep drawer. This shape might be a bit uncomfortable because there’s a lot of space but seemingly no smart way to store things inside. To take advantage of drawer freezers, get several bins and use them as small drawers, so you can place things like popsicles, bags of frozen vegetables, and more.
Make an inventory
And now that you had to empty your freezer to place the bins, it might be the perfect time to make an inventory of everything you have. The importance of making categories is that certain foods or ingredients need higher amounts of cold, while others are less sensitive, so you need to store similar items together for maximum capacity.
Use freezer-safe containers
Some containers and bags are not really suited to be used inside the freezer, because they don’t really handle low temperatures or the liquids can expand and crack the container. To prevent unpleasant accidents, make sure to purchase freezer-safe containers, especially if you’re going to store liquids and leftovers that have been previously cooked because they change size the most.
Label and date everything
The main reason why people store things in their freezer is to make them last much longer than they would in another environment. So, if you want to keep a close track of expiration dates or when a meal was first prepared and frozen, you might want to purchase tags and start labeling and putting the date on everything inside. This acts wonders on new moms who need to store their breast milk.
Freeze in small portions
Most people purchase food and ingredients in huge bags that’ll last for a few months, but this can be a real hassle when you need to defrost food to just use a smaller portion. Keeping this in mind, separate your food in small bags or containers before you store it. That way, next time you need a small portion you’ll simply take it out of the freeze and get to cook.
Freeze things vertically and flat
This is the ultimate space-saving tip for your freezer! Whenever you have food or an ingredient that can be manipulated easily, pour it on a Ziploc bag then store it flat on the freezer until it hardens. Once it hardens you can store it vertically to save even more space.
As you can see, a few simple tricks could do wonders in your freezer. Start saving up space and organizing all of your meals the right way and you’ll see how cooking gets easier!