When we first started traveling, food was simply part of the experience. We wanted to try new restaurants, sample local specialties, grab a few snacks along the way, and enjoy ourselves. Whether something was particularly healthy did not really enter into the equation. Over time, that changed. We started paying more attention to our weight and wanted to maintain the progress we had made at home while traveling with our diet goals. This lead to a surprise fix for our problem with travel and diet.

First instinct; Eat healthier.

That seemed like the obvious answer, but it created a problem. The more we tried to make every meal a healthy choice, the less enjoyable some of those meals became. We would eat something that looked like the responsible choice, still feel unsatisfied, and then find ourselves compensating with snacks or treats later.

Eventually, we realized we were solving the wrong problem.

Instead of trying to make every meal healthy, we needed to understand how the food we were eating fit into the entire day.

We, to this day, have a tough time with the word “healthy” for the reasons we will discuss.

First, We Figured Out What We Actually Needed

The first step was figuring out our approximate daily calorie needs. That gave us a baseline and made it possible to start making decisions based on something more useful than whether a food had a reputation for being healthy.

From there, we stopped thinking about food as good or bad. We started looking at the basic breakdown of a meal: calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

For a while, we tracked what we ate. The goal was not to track everything forever. We wanted to learn what a particular portion looked like and get better at estimating calories when we did not have exact information. Our experiment was simply to figure out how much we ate when we ate out.

That exercise led to one of the more surprising discoveries in our travel diet.

Healthy Can Mean More Calories, Temptation

Fried chicken and potato wedges from a gas station could fit our goals much better than a Cobb salad at a restaurant.

Obviously, that does not mean fried chicken is healthier than a salad. The point was that the label “healthy” told us very little about how much we were actually eating. A Cobb salad can come with cheese, bacon, avocado, dressing, and a large portion. The fried chicken and potatoes might be a much more predictable amount of food.

Once we understood that, we stopped asking whether something was healthy and started asking whether it worked for the day we had planned.

That was a much more useful question.

The Trap We Had Fallen Into

Trying to eat healthy while traveling created another problem that took us a while to recognize.

We were often overeating because the meals themselves were not particularly satisfying.

A lighter meal might leave us thinking about food an hour later. After spending the meal making what felt like the responsible choice, it was also easy to justify a treat afterward. The result was sometimes a healthy meal followed by snacks that we would not have eaten if we had simply had a more satisfying meal in the first place. Yeah, that is the lizard brain at work which is a real problem for many of us.

It’s Not Exercise, It Is Fatigue Talking

Travel added another complication: we had to get better at distinguishing actual hunger from being tired.

After a long day of driving or flying, it is easy to interpret fatigue as hunger even though you may have sat all day. On a day when we had been hiking or walking around a city for hours, however, the extra hunger was real. We found, those situations could feel remarkably similar even though our bodies had very different caloric needs.

The other major problem was that we were not planning.

When we waited until we were hungry to figure out what we were going to eat, the available options made the decision for us. Maybe there was a fast-food restaurant nearby. Maybe the only convenient option was a large restaurant meal. Either way, we were making a food decision at exactly the point when we had the least patience for making a good one.

We needed to plan before we were hungry.

The Fix Was Planning, Not Restriction

Before a trip, we started looking at what each day would involve. A day spent hiking called for something different than eight hours in a car. A day spent walking around a city called for something different than an afternoon sitting by the pool.

That gave us a rough idea of how much food we were likely to want, but it also helped us decide where we wanted to spend those calories.

We started planning meals before we left, while we still had the luxury of being thoughtful about our choices.

Just as importantly, we put everything on the menu.

Chips were on the menu. Jerky was on the menu. Granola bars were on the menu. Grocery store fried chicken was on the menu. So were beer, wine, and ice cream.

Consistent Calories, Not Health Food

The difference was that we knew roughly what those foods represented in terms of calories.

That made some foods that we might normally consider less healthy” incredibly useful for travel. Chips and jerky are easy to carry, do not require a restaurant, and can be portioned into a known number of calories. Having those foods available meant we could keep moving without reaching the point where we were desperately hungry and willing to eat whatever was in front of us.

The indulgent foods also served a purpose. A bag of chips or some jerky might not be the most nutritionally impressive meal, but it could give us a predictable amount of food while leaving room for something we really wanted later.

We Stopped Trying To Be ‘Good’ Every Day

Another change was realizing that every day of a trip did not need to have the same food strategy.

Some days could include a great dinner, drinks, or dessert. On other days, we could keep things simple with our snacks, a straightforward breakfast, and an easier dinner.

That approach worked better than trying to be disciplined at every meal. A day of simpler food gave us room for an indulgent meal later. Conversely, after a big restaurant dinner, there was no reason to make the next morning another food event.

This also meant we could enjoy treats without feeling like we had blown our calorie goals.

If we had kept our food fairly simple during the day, there might be room for ice cream in the afternoon. Knowing that the ice cream was part of the plan made it easier to enjoy it without turning the entire day into an unplanned eating spree.

Hotel Breakfast Became Our Easy Win

Hotel breakfast was another tool we started using more deliberately.

It was not necessarily the most exciting meal of the trip, but that was exactly what made it useful. WE could chose our portions and options from what was there. Over time, we found these breakfasts were pretty routine across hotel chains. We generally knew what would be available, and we could put together a predictable breakfast without spending much time or money figuring out where to eat.

That gave us a known calorie supply to start the day and left more flexibility for lunch and dinner. Sometimes, we could use them to grab some fruit to take for the day ahead as well.

Not every meal needed to be memorable. We were traveling to experience the destination, not to make every breakfast an event.

We Planned Dinner Before We Were Hungry

Dinner planning made an even bigger difference.

Rather than waiting until we were hungry and then looking for somewhere to eat, we would research restaurants the night before. Reviews helped us narrow down the options, while photos gave us a surprisingly useful idea of portion sizes.

Restaurant descriptions can only tell you so much. Seeing the actual plate gave us a better sense of whether we were looking at a modest meal or enough food for two or three people.

By the time dinner arrived, we already had an idea of where we wanted to go and what we might order.

That removed a lot of the decision-making that happens when you are hungry, tired, and standing in an unfamiliar part of town.

We Planned Our Drinks Too

Drinks were another place where calories could sneak up on us.

Buying beer or wine from a grocery store gave us a much better idea of what we were consuming than ordering whatever happened to sound good at a restaurant or bar. It also helped us avoid turning a couple of drinks into a surprisingly large calorie expense.

There was another benefit: it usually cost less.

The goal was never to eliminate drinks. We simply wanted them to be a deliberate part of the trip rather than something we added without thinking.

The Unexpected Result

The irony was that eating a little less “healthy” helped us manage our weight better while traveling.

First, it cut costs because we were not relying on restaurants for every meal. Second, it controlled calories because we knew what we were eating before we got hungry. Most importantly, we still ate food that felt fun and different from what we normally ate at home.

Nothing about the approach required us to go hungry.

We also did not feel cheated. These were not our everyday meals, and we were not trying to recreate our normal routine while traveling. We were making room for the things we wanted to experience.

That could mean fried chicken one day, a great restaurant dinner the next, or ice cream in the middle of the afternoon.

The important part was that those choices fit into the overall plan.

What We Actually Fixed

Looking back, our original mistake was thinking that eating well meant making the healthiest possible choice every time we were hungry.

Travel taught us that a better approach was to think about the entire day.

We learned how much food we actually needed and got better at recognizing the difference between being hungry and simply being tired from a long drive or flight.

Planning ahead made a bigger difference than we expected. We could decide where to spend our calories before we were hungry, keep convenient foods with us, and look at restaurant portions before choosing where to eat.

Even our drinks and treats became part of the plan. Rather than feeling like we were breaking the rules, we knew when we had room for something we wanted.

Evolution Not Revolution

None of that sounds particularly revolutionary.

The surprising part was what happened when we put it all together.

Our calorie intake stayed relatively stable. Our weight stayed where we wanted it. We spent less money. And we got to eat plenty of food that was more interesting than the meals we would normally make at home.

In the end, we did not need a perfect travel diet.

We needed a travel diet that accounted for the fact that we were traveling.

Once we stopped trying to eat “perfectly” and started planning how we wanted to spend our calories, we found that we could enjoy the food, enjoy the trip, and still come home in roughly the same place we left.

The post The Surprise Fix To A Bad Travel Diet first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Schedules change. Activity changes. Food options change. Even the role of meals can change depending on where you are.

This series comes from our own experience trying to maintain a calorie budget while traveling. We are not chasing perfection. We are trying to understand why habits that work at home become harder on the road. Over the next several articles, we will look at common travel situations and how to think about them. A key idea is that a small amount of planning can make a big difference.

Travel will always be unpredictable. But it is often easier to set a rough plan for food, activity, and timing than to make every decision in the moment. Before we get into strategies, it helps to understand the core problem.

Travel does not just change where we eat. It breaks the routines that make it easier to make eating decisions.

Why Travel Disrupts Eating Habits

Most people are creatures of habit. We go to bed at similar times, wake up on a schedule, and eat meals at set times. Our days often follow a pattern. Life can be busy, but it is usually predictable.

Travel is not predictable.

Before you even arrive, you are on someone else’s schedule. Flights leave at fixed times, and sometimes they are delayed or canceled. Traffic can change plans. Delays happen. Meetings move. Tours start when they start. Food is available only at certain times. This removes the structure that normally supports eating habits.

Travel also adds new choices. Trying local food is part of the experience. Whether for work or vacation, there is often a desire to try new meals and restaurants. Work travel adds more layers. Business dinners, client lunches, hotel breakfasts, and events all shape when and what you eat.

Food is also less consistent. In some places, options are limited. Sometimes airport food is the only choice. Other times, you eat what is available between plans.

Even when food is available, it may not be familiar. Portion sizes also vary. A normal meal in one place may be much larger or smaller than what you expect. Some meals are shared. Some are served in courses. Meals can also serve different roles. In some places, dinner is a large main meal. In others, food is shared on small plates over time.

Your body does not separate cultural and social eating from calorie needs. It still counts intake in the same way.

Why This Matters

These changes are neither good nor bad. They are just part of travel.

Most nutrition goals depend on consistency. At home, we know when we will eat. We know our activity level. We know our food options. Travel removes that stability. This is where a calorie budget becomes useful.

A calorie budget is not about restriction. It is a simple way to think about tradeoffs during a trip. If you plan a large dinner, you may adjust earlier meals. If you walk more in a day, that changes things, too.

The goal is not a perfect plan. Travel rarely allows that. The goal is to avoid reacting to every situation in the moment. A small amount of awareness makes travel easier to manage.

Understanding why travel disrupts eating habits is the first step. Next, we will look at how to use a calorie budget when your schedule and food choices are always changing.

The post Why Travel Is A Diet’s Strange Trap first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Portions Vs Meals

In another post, we discussed the difference between portions and meals. We also discussed what a serving size is and isn’t. Since we know a serving size is something based on what others eat, we want to define a portion as the amount of something you eat based on your calorie budget. For example, you may order a pizza but may only eat two slices of an extra-large pie. Was that a portion or a serving of that pizza?

We are calling that out intentionally as we know there is confusion around the definitions of portions vs servings. This becomes a bit more problematic to talk about in multi-course meals where we have proteins, starches, and usually a vegetable as a main entree plus sides. 

This gets more problematic because when building an a la carte meal, you will need portions that make up all three. When you take home leftovers from a restaurant, you may see all three as one portion of a meal. This portion thing begins to sound a little weird but, no worries, we will clear it up a bit later. 

Portion Planning 

To plan for a month of meals we need to extend the number of items we need to have on hand.  Don’t worry, they don’t necessarily add to our work. Remember we can gain portions from simply cooking a little more or taking home leftovers from a restaurant. Before we get to that, let’s give ourselves a definition and again a little harmless math.

• Number of Diners per Meal (NDpM) which is, you guessed it, the number of people you need to feed.
• A complete Meal we define as a meal that approximates proteins, starches, and vegetables to approximate the USDA MyPlate standard.

Let’s also use the table and definitions we had in the previous post to work through our math.

Running Total of Meals Worksheet

The Math

Let’s assume 4 diners for our NdpM. What we then have for the total number of portions we need to make or have on hand for four weeks is 4 x 84  or 336 individual portions correct? That is not exactly the right number as we had defined a complete meal as containing 3 items. This means our Made To Order, A La Carte, and Snack-style meals all may be constructed of individual items such as a portion of chicken, rice, and say roasted corn. The Made To Order may also be complete as is such as fried rice with pork and vegetables. 

That leaves us with roughly a need for the following minimum and maximum items for a meal. 

Min and Max Items per Meal Worksheet

Putting this all together we would need a minimum and maximum number of meal portions, as shown below.

Combined Totals Worksheet

When we multiply those totals by our NDpM of 4 you will notice that we get absurd numbers of between 352 and 672 portions of food to feed a group of 4 for a month. In our case, we are only two so we get between 176 to 336 portions of food. 

They Are Real Numbers

They are real but not scary. Remember that is how much you need for 4 people for a month. We also need to realize that If you buy a 2lb bag of corn, depending on your and your diner’s calorie budgets, you may get eight 4-ounce portions of vegetables from it. When you cook a 3lb roast, after water loss, you may get ten 4-ounce portions from it. What happens if you throw in some mashed potatoes which are just as easy to create twelve 4-ounce portions?

What happens is that you have just covered a Made To Order meal that covers creating up to two complete meals for four plus extra portions left over to use for another meal. You just knocked out 20 portions in one meal. Wait, it gets better. What about pre-made or takeout? In each of these cases, you may end up with more food than can be eaten in one sitting. Those extra portions can be used to make meals later as well.

Well Duh! 

We spent a lot of time telling you something you already knew….maybe? We all inherently do this type of planning from week to week but maybe not month to month. By being cognizant of how we can plan longer term, and reduce food making to portions we need rather than having not enough or too much. 

As we started to cook at home more, we thought we needed a lot more than we did. We found ourselves cooking and storing too much. We arrived at thinking about portions over serving size or complete meals to help us plan. We also focused on a calorie budget to make sure our meals were appropriately sized. This began to save us time and money over the aggregate. 

This is also a rolling plan meaning after a while, the meals you make help support the extra portions. This happens more naturally as you learn to think about the trade-offs of say doing individual items such as a roast vs a casserole. It also eventually leads to having a larger mix of items you want to eat at home which can reduce dependency on eating out. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed the nuances of planning with portions over just meals. At first glance the numbers are scary however they are simply numbers. Once you understand this is a month of food numbers aren’t that absurd.

Further with some lifestyle tweaks, we found we could quickly fill them with very little effort. They do give us an approach to managing our food, shopping, and eating out with a goal of efficiency and reduced waste. Lastly, this approach helps us keep an eye on our calorie budgets whether we want to slim down, maintain, or bulk up. 

The post How To Make Meal Plans With Portions first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Digging Right In

There is a difference between a portion and a serving even though many people consider them the same. However, they are not synonymous and that fallacy can cause many people to overeat.  We will abbreviate the AHA site here:

• A portion is the amount of something you eat that aligns with your personal dietary needs and goals.
• A serving is the amount of something that is suggested as commonly consumed by everyone based on the USDA’s Nutrition label.

Seems simple? How much you choose to eat vs what the suggested amount is for an item but unfortunately, it isn’t simple. Packaging, marketing, and labeling are focused on serving size and not portion size. Even the AHA will interchange the two in their writing which re-enforces the challenges of the meaning of a serving size. 

Why Does That Matter?

That messaging leads many of us on low-calorie budgets to have frustrating choices between over-consumption or wasted food. Why is that? The reason that is a challenge is that serving sizes are not tied to what we need for our DRI. 

According to the FDA: By law, serving sizes must be based on the amounts of foods and beverages that people are actually eating, not what they should be eating.

As people’s consumption changes, the serving size changes with it. As the serving size changes, the packaging may need to change with it. According to the FDA, this leads to overconsumption. For example, we used to drink 8 oz of soda. We now, as a population, usually consume 12. How did that happen? 

The best way to answer that is by understanding marketing, eating trends, human motivation, economies of scale, availability of products, business, affluence, health trends, etc. We feel that is outside of the scope of this post. While we feel there is a salient thread that runs through this topic, it is only a set of hunches. For now, knowing the correlation between serving size and population generalizations should be enough to make us think about stopping using serving as a size.  

Portions over Servings FTW

One of the most challenging things is learning what the portion size of something is vs the serving size. If you are like us, it is a letdown to see how much less a portion of something is than its serving size. There is a silver lining to less is more we will get to. Right now, let’s talk about how to reset your visual expectations. 

A big challenge when moving from serving size is defining what it looks like so you can recognize it. What irks us is most times that information and visual representation come with opinions on ‘healthy’ alternatives. Yes, we all want to be healthy but change isn’t so simple as snapping our fingers. 

The reason it irks us is the fact that we are already taking something away when we go from servings to portions. We know through experiences that not everyone can change everything at once. To us, this is one of the reasons people who want to reduce their body size may fail to change or ride a diet rollercoaster. I know I can lose weight and eat fried chicken. Whether what we eat is healthy or not is open to interpretation but I know I didn’t cheat on my goals by doing it. 

Let us climb down from our little soap box and get back to the visualizing portion sizes which is much more helpful. We found a good way to visualize portions from the British Heart Foundation which is based on a specific calorie per day calorie budget. No matter what your goal is, this gives you a great visual guide. Eating more, eating less, eating healthy or not, here is a visual of a portion based on a calorie count. You can do the math for your needs.

With Every Cloud

Ah, yes, the benefits of knowledge. By using portion over serving size, we can more accurately buy food. Looking at your plate in a restaurant you can decide how much you need and take home. For us, this increased knowledge has had a direct impact on our food and restaurant budget. It has also made it much easier to stay on a calorie budget as we package our food accordingly. 

When we know what a portion is to us, we can buy it in bulk and then portion it into containers. This is why vacuum sealing became important to us. Restaurant meals now also generally produce a second take-home meal. If the single serving size is too big of a portion, say a 20 oz bottle of soda, we opt for something smaller. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed why we tightened up our terminology around portions and servings. Serving Size is a terrible way to understand what you need to eat for your body goals. You are essentially tying yourself to the rest of the general population’s eating habits. Not only are you tied to it, but you are adding to it by positive reinforcements as a buyer in the market. You do you is always what we preach. We believe it is hard for you to do you if you are tied to everyone else’s body goals and calorie needs. 

The post Here Is How Serving Size Lies To Us first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Note: Products, services, and suppliers shown or linked to in this post are for example purposes only. They are not a direct endorsement of them, their brand, or the seller.

Everything Old is New Again

This type of vacuum sealing is not new. We owned a FoodSaver years ago similar to this one that had an attachment to vacuum seal mason jars. We never used it. It wasn’t convenient due to the amount of counter space it took up and having to connect 3 things to use it. Then we found this style and our world changed.

This Started With Canning

Earlier on we learned how to freeze and store food by usage types and times. Our next experiments were in shelf-stable methods. The immediate thing we thought of when thinking about creating food that could be shelf-stable for storage was canning. We knew we could store food by using water-bath canning because we grew up with it. As we looked at canning equipment, we ran across this type of vacuum sealer.

Let’s be crystal clear, as I have read on the interwebs many times about this miracle electric canner. This is not an automatic canner. It is a vacuum-sealing device. If you use it to preserve food in the same way as canning, you may just end up with some weird science experiments with food spoilage.

Canning vs Vacuum Sealing

Canning and Vacuum Sealing are not the same thing. We would say they aren’t even used for the same outcomes. Here is how they differ:

• Canning uses heat, vacuum, and sometimes acidity to preserve food.
• Vacuum sealing uses a vacuum to preserve quality.

In canning, you are removing pathogens and creating an environment in which they can not grow. Vacuum sealing does not destroy pathogens. What vacuum sealing does is remove air from around the food. Some pathogens can still exist and grow as some can live in an anaerobic environment. In general, we don’t vacuum seal those types of foods that are problematic. This is why we make the distinction between quality preserver and food preservation.

But Dry Canning….

We won’t discuss that as it is a heated topic, no pun intended. Each of these methods has pro’s and con’s but our blog is about making it easy. Dry canning is a food preservation method, not a quality preservation method. It also doesn’t work for many items we will want to store at lower temperatures. For example, you aren’t going to put cheese in a mason jar in a 200℉ oven and expect it to be ok.

It’s the Water Too

What is rarely discussed in vacuum sealing is how it helps preserve the quality of hygroscopic foods. What are those? Hygroscopic foods attract moisture from the surrounding environment. These foods draw in moisture from the air. Limit the air getting to food, and limit the humidity’s impact on the food.

This is obvious in some cases such as brown sugar. If you have ever accidentally left brown sugar out in humidity for any period, it will usually clump to the point of being unusable. That same process is at work on your cereal, chips, crackers, and candy. This process will turn a nice crisp peanut brittle into a chewy candy or deflate your divinity pretty quickly.

What and What Can’t You Use This Method On:

Mason jar vacuum sealing is great for items you want to open, reseal, and reopen again and again. It is also great for irregular or soft items that won’t vacuum seal in bags well. Here are a few things we have learned:

Works:

• Any dry goods such as dehydrated fruits and vegetables.
• Baked or fried snack items such as chips, crackers, etc.
• Breads such as biscuits or items with crusts like mini-quiches.
• Candies and cookies.
• Baking and cooking staples like sugar and sea salts.
• Non-food items such as bath bombs, soaps, or other things that contain volatile compounds like essential oils.

Doesn’t work:

• High moisture items such as young cheeses.
• Items destined for the freezer as they will still freezer burn.
• Items that produce gasses such as roasted coffee beans.

The last item above is one of the gotchas with this quality preservation method. As food breaks down, it can create gases. Eventually, this process can break the vacuum seal of the container. While not always obvious at first, you should monitor what foods you store by checking on them every so often. If one is consistently losing a vacuum, it may create gas and ultimately be past its time.

How To Tips

These sealers are almost bulletproof however a couple of tricks help.

• When sealing, press the tool down fully onto the jar, then pull up a quarter to half an inch. By doing this we can get a better pull of vacuum.
• Check the vacuum the same way you would in canning by making sure the lid doesn’t pop back when pushed on.
• After vacuuming, finger-tighten the ring onto the sealed jar. The ring provides extra protection and helps preserve the seal even if gasses develop.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed mason jar vacuum sealing in depth. We offered some ideas on what works and doesn’t work and a couple of tips to make things easier. Also, remember this method is great for non-food items. Once you make friends with the mason jar sealer, you will find you can make more at home. This is due to the fact you will be able to use what you make longer.

The post How To Get Air Out Of Mason Jars first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Note: Products, services, and suppliers shown or linked to in this post are for example purposes only. They are not a direct endorsement of them, their brand, or the seller.

First A Cold Background

TL; DR Warning: The first half of this post discusses the history and mechanics of consumer freezing. If you are here for the tips and traps feel free to scroll down further.

Freezing food as a preservation method has not been around for a long time for humans. Yes, of course, there were ice houses and local climate-specific places that had it but for us as a people en masse, not so much. Freezing as we know it today wasn’t something on the consumer’s radar until Clarence Birdseye’s process of flash freezing intersected with the advent of electric freezers. Even then, it was hard to establish a consumer market for multiple reasons.

Birdseye’s work was key to unlocking how to freeze food to have it be palatable when it was thawed. What Birdseye perfected was the process of flash freezing at very low temperatures. Flash freezing minimizes the growth of ice crystals. Ice crystals, and their growth, are what make food mushy and watery when thawed. Minimizing their growth is key to freezing with minimal damage. 

The Mechanics of it All

We all know water freezes at 32℉ or 0℃. It is through the transition of the state from liquid to solid that ice crystals appear. The more water in the food and the longer the time to a solid state, the more likely the damage to the items frozen. When we are freezing non-liquids, they freeze from the outside in. This means the larger the volume of the item to freeze, the longer the journey to freeze. One nuance of freezing to be aware of is that liquids freeze from the top down not just outside in.

What most of us don’t realize is food is only partially water. If you freeze a steak the water in it freezes at 32℉. What about the meat fibers themselves? It takes a temperature of 26℉-28℉ degrees to start freezing meat fibers. It’s not just meat that has these challenges. Sugars, alcohol, and fats all impact the freezing point of an item. 

Knowledge Is Power

Ready to throw up your hands and walk away never to freeze again? Let’s talk about how to handle these pesky problems. Rather than say what won’t work, let’s set out two axioms to help us. We can use these as a guide as to what can freeze well and how to freeze it with the best quality:

Axiom One: The faster the transition from cold to frozen the smaller the ice crystal development in both size and number.

Axiom Two: Due to the nature of freezing from outside to inside, the smaller the volume of an item, the faster it can be frozen.

We now have rules we can use to our advantage! Before we put them to use, let’s do a fridge and freezer tune-up. Most experts will agree the right temperature for a Freezer is 0℉. Fridges have a bit more discrepancy from 35℉ to under 40℉ as 40℉ and above put us in the zone. The reality is neither a freezer nor a fridge maintains a perfectly consistent temperature. 

Machines and Guidance Aren’t Perfect

Both appliances cycle off and on so they may be slightly higher or lower than the set temperature at any one time by a couple of degrees. We also know the shorter the trip from fridge to frozen, the better quality we have.  While we like roughly 35℉ degrees, you will have to determine what is right for your needs. We know this can be lower than the USDA recommendation however, we rather err on the side of cold to help us shorten the trip from fridge to frozen.

In terms of temperature, don’t trust the 1-5 rating numbers or cold/colder/coldest settings on most fridges and freezers. It is best to purchase a thermometer for each unit that shows what the temperature is set to. When you stop and think about it, in a fridge the difference between frozen water and the danger zone is only 7 degrees. While freezers are more forgiving, they too are imperfect machines. Time above 0 may lead to damaged food due to ice crystal growth and conditions such as freezer burn. Pro-tip as well; batteries have no love of cold. This is why we chose mechanical.

Ready to freeze, let’s talk Tips and Traps

Tips:

• When possible remove all surface air contact by vacuum sealing the item.
• Always cool items in the fridge before freezing. Since heat rises, the coldest part of the fridge is always the bottom. Use this to your advantage by placing your items as low as possible.
• Metal is more conductive than other materials. Use this to your advantage by placing items on parchment or wax paper on a cookie or half-sheet pan to freeze them.
• The thinner and flatter you can make an item, the faster it will freeze. A bowl full of berries won’t freeze as quickly as having them on a cookie sheet.
• Pre-freeze items (2-24 hours max) that contain a lot of water or have soft structures such as raw fish, berries, and vegetables before vacuum sealing. This pre-freeze allows the soft structures to harden so they can handle the vacuum pressures.
• Items that are mostly liquid we don’t care about textures such as mashed potatoes, soups, and creamed vegetables, are fine in BPA-free plastic containers.
• Label everything keep a list of numbers of items and be militant about it. When 30 items are in the same type of containers it gets problematic to know what is in what. 
• For really odd shapes and raw meats, you can remove air by freezing it submerged in water. You can place an item in a zip lock bag, add water to it, and bleed the air out through a coffee stir straw. During the cooling and freezing process, it is best to have it in a bowl or baking pan in case of leaks. 

Traps:

• When you freeze sauces or gravies, freeze them in separate containers from their entrees. Freezing sauces can ‘break’ them. When a sauce is thawed it will need to be mixed back together again. This is why we recommend freezing them separately from their intended target food.
• Vacuum-sealed mason jars will not provide the same protection a vacuum-sealed bag will. Only use them for short-term storage.
• When using mason jars with shoulders are prone to breakage in freezers due to expansion of fluids when frozen. If you are going to freeze something in a mason jar, only use the ones with straight sides.
• Don’t freeze items that are larger than you will use when thawed. If you have a pack of 20 hotdogs, and you thaw it out, you need to have plans for 20 hotdogs as refreezing will further degrade them. 
• Resealable bags of items like fries and tater-tots from the grocery stores -aren’t- resealable. Reclosing the bag with the zipper without the air being removed can result in freezer burn no matter how ‘re-sealable’ the bag claims to be.
• Freezer paper isn’t. The freezer paper will not keep air out. It is fine for short-term storage but doesn’t hold up for our longer-term needs.

Wrapping Up

 We have talked a lot in this post about the history and mechanics of freezing as a preservation method. Like many things, freezing isn’t complicated but it does have gotchas. Our tips and traps section lays out some common scenarios, how to handle them, and what is not going to work. These were lessons learned by us over time. We hope they help others avoid some of the problems we ran into on our journey.

The post Tips On How To Use A Freezer Better first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Note: Products, services, and suppliers shown or linked to in this post are for example purposes only. They are not a direct endorsement of them, their brand, or the seller.

It’s Just About Freezing

If you have ever tried to vacuum seal rare roast beef or raw fish, you know it is not simple. What about preserving brown sugar in high-humidity environments where it wants to clump? Did you know you can preserve those kale chips you dehydrated a bit longer through vacuum sealing? Admittedly, not everyone loves kale chips, but it is no different from dealing with homemade crackers or potato chips. 

Before we get too deep let’s set the context that we are talking about what can be done at home with an average or slightly above-average machine. We are not talking about commercial processing or long-term storage. Those types of vacuum sealing require special knowledge, and different tools, and have different purposes like extending shelf life for years not a couple of months. That doesn’t work with our 1-year max timeline discussed here.

Also, we know there are fans of Sous Vide and marination via vacuum sealing and vacuum tumbling. Those are both cooking and processing methods, not preservation methods. We won’t be discussing them here.

What Exactly Is Vacuum Sealing?

What does vacuum sealing do? Vacuum sealing does two things:

• Removes air and reduces humidity carried by the air in a container. This is what happens in containers such as mason jars, vacuum containers, and bags.
• Reduces the surface air contact for the food which only occurs in vacuum bags. 

Vacuum sealers do not remove 100% of the air or moisture from an item. For this reason, considered a life extender and not a preservation method like canning. Much of the reason they can’t remove all the air is because foods are not simple shapes, hard enough, or dry enough. While there are ways of adding oxygen absorbers and using Mylar for preservation, that is another post.

We Categorize This Into 4 Types

There are 4 main types of vacuum sealing methods available to us. Each has a different purpose and targets something specific. We assert while there is some overlap, it is better to focus on learning each before trying to use hybrids.

What are and Tips for the Big Four:

• Pre-cut or self-made vacuum bags are what many of us are familiar with when we first use a vacuum sealer. The purpose is to remove all air and create an air-free barrier around the food. Biggest tip here is that the rough side of the bags, if it only has one, should always be the side placed in contact with the sealing element.
• Items stored for long periods that will be opened over and over again are perfect for air-lock vacuum bags. We find these best for things that we want to keep moisture away from once the original package has been opened such as storing desiccants or oxygen absorbers. People do use them for liquids for marinades. For a lot less money a gallon bag and a disposable coffee stirrer can create the same effect.
• Mason jars are our go-to hard-sided storage for storing items like sugar, dried herbs, and homemade chips. They are best for items that are fragile and would be crushed by vacuum bags. You use a vacuum sealer for the mason jar. An important distinction we make is we are not advocating dry canning. Dry canning is similar in process to vacuum sealing a mason jar but with the addition of heat that some errantly believe to be the equivalent of preservation-like canning.
• Vacuum containers with built-in air-locks. These are similar in purpose to mason jars however ever can have different shapes to accommodate different types of foods that mason jars can’t. Empirically we have only found glass containers to work well. Plastic containers have either leaked or broken so we have stopped using them.

Done with Simple, now the Nuances

All fairly simple techniques are used to extend the life of both shelf-stable foods and help slow the onset of freezer burn. Vacuum bags, however, are not as simple as they sound. They also allow for some of the more advanced tricks to make them much more flexible in usage.  The specific callouts are:

• Standard vacuum and seal which needs no explaining.
• Handling wet items such as raw fish and cooked rare meat.
• Sealing items that crush easily when not frozen such as bread or fried chicken.

Let’s talk about the last two before we get into some additional tips. The amount of moisture in something directly affects how easy it is to vacuum seal it. Moist items like lunch meat take very little additional prep work. Raw meat, fish, and even rare meat can contain too much liquid to properly vacuum seal. As an aside, the wet setting on a vacuum sealer isn’t always going to help. The setting creates more heat for the sealer, however, it is not always enough when foods are very moist.

Handling the Moist and Wet

When vacuum sealing items with moisture the vacuum sealer may not be able to pull down the vacuum level far enough to trigger a sealing cycle. Here are two easy ways to handle that. 

• When dealing with light moisture, roll up a piece of paper towel and create a dam between the food and sealer. This will help stop the flow of liquids allowed into the machine. 
• Pre-freeze for an hour or so when you have high moisture content, such as raw fish or rare meat. You do not want to leave the food in the freezer long enough to freeze, however a light freeze will trap the moisture. Simply place the food on a silicone mat, wax paper, or parchment on a half-sheet pan (or cookie sheet) and allow it to freeze for a little bit. Using the dam technique plus pre-freezing will help limit the moisture. 

One More Vacuum Tip

Crushable items (bread, fried chicken, rolls) take a bit more processing but are similar to sealing wet items. These items require pre-freezing longer until they are fully frozen. But won’t this risk freezer burn? This will not happen in low-moisture leftovers and items such as bread. Once fully frozen, they can be vacuumed and sealed however, sealing should be done via manual or pulse sealing if possible.

Storage Precaution

One of the biggest issues we have run into is gasket damage. Vacuum sealing machines use soft gaskets to seal around the bags. It takes very little to damage those gaskets. It is maddening to pull out a machine that worked fine 3 months ago only to find out it is now no longer creating vacuum pressure. Two Tips here:

• When you clean your machine, gently swap down the gaskets with bleach and water mixture or remove them and wash them -if- removable. Dry them before putting them back and gently press them back in place.
• Never store the machine in a locked position. Over time, this can crush the gaskets enough to stop them from sealing.
• Remove any fluid or material from vacuum holes in the machine so they don’t clog.
• Make sure the heating element is cleaned as well to help extend its life.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed vacuum sealing and some of the nuances of it. We have given you some tips and information to help your sealing go better. While not a perfect preservation method, you can effectively produce food and stock it in the same way your grocery store does. In our experience, we have found nothing that says vacuum-sealing victory like having a mess of homemade biscuits and fried chicken in the freezer ready to be reheated when the need arises. We hope you will find the same to be true for you.

The post How To’s For Better Vacuum Sealing first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Note: Food storage is a complicated topic with many different nuances and techniques to explore. We will begin by talking about the subject iteratively. That approach can provide value while we move from the straightforward to the complex. Our goal is to give the reader something tangible to walk away with knowing this is not an all-encompassing post.

Bad and Spoiled are Different

To begin, let’s start with an understanding of spoilage. Non-shelf stable food is susceptible to spoilage for two hours when left in the danger zone (40-140℉). That is a blanket statement and there are other nuances to this that we can make exceptions for however, let’s stick to what is considered safe for all. Even shelf-stable foods will eventually go bad if not stored correctly. Eventually, even cooking oil can spoil by going rancid. 

We need to differentiate between the concepts of spoiled and bad.  Spoiled is food that is unsafe to eat due to pathogens and other nasties that can make you sick. Bad is a subjective term we use to discuss something that has degraded and has become unpalatable. Here is how we differentiate:

• We don’t think others would argue that when raw chicken sits unrefrigerated at 80℉ for 6 hours it should be considered spoiled. The chicken left out like that has a high probability of pathogens such as salmonella. 
• We would consider raw chicken bad, not spoiled if it has freezer burn. As a result of freezer burn, the chicken may have off flavors or less than pleasing textures. The chicken is still usable in such dishes as soup but may not make great fried chicken if the freezer burn is extensive.
• Brown sugar left open, in a high-humidity environment, will become unusable due to clumping as it is hygroscopic (attracts water). It will taste the same, but it has turned bad in terms of use such as creaming.

We Avoided Spoiled but Not Bad

In this example, some can become very ill from the spoiled chicken as cooking it to a safe temperature alone may not remove all the toxins. In contrast, the freezer-burned chicken and clumped sugar still have culinary possibilities but their potential has been limited. Those are two drastically different concepts. We want to avoid both spoiled and bad and proper storage helps us stop all three cases. 

When we started doing this, we made a lot of mistakes around bad not spoiled. It turns out it is easy to have this happen. Most of us know we don’t leave the chicken out on the patio for hours on end. What we didn’t realize was how to manage our storage at home so things didn’t get stale or become freezer-burned. 

Dividing Storage is About Usage

Let’s break storage into a  few segments and purposes based on what we learned worked for us. These are not guidelines for how long they can or should store something. These are empirical classifications based on what worked for us. In another post, we will discuss the economies of scale this approach offers to limit wasted food, money, and time.

We divided up the storage into 5 primary functions to keep us organized:

• Short-term cold and shelf-stable storage. These were our fridge and kitchen cupboards. We learned to keep a set of ‘staples’ that any time we used, immediately went on a shopping list in our app. 
• Short-term frozen storage: This is the freezer in our kitchen. It holds items like frozen pizzas, ice cream, fish sticks, ice cubes, etc. to have certain highly used or on-demand items at hand in the kitchen.
• Mid-term cold and cooling for freezing. This mini-fridge contains items such as pickles, sauces, eggs, cheese, etc. which must be kept out of the zone. We also use the fridge to prep items for frozen storage.
• Mid-term frozen and shelf-stable storage. This is our second freezer and pantry and is where the differentiators between bad and spoiled show up the most. We will talk about why this happened so often later in the post. Our goal is to use anything we place in this within 3-6 months.
• Deep frozen and shelf-stable storage. This segment of storage differed from our mid-term storage. These areas included our basement where we have shelves dedicated to economy of scale staples such as flour, dried fruits, and oil. We processed items for deep cold storage in a way they could last up to a year.

Intent is Key to Making it Work

Most of us know how to make use of the first 3 storage segments we mentioned. What we added was the intent behind using them to stay organized and not produce waste. By establishing a pattern of use for them, we were able to monitor them through an app and magnetic whiteboard on the fridge/freezer. Being intentional, with a way to check what was going bad, cut our waste dramatically. This mindset also helped us in other ways.

By forcing us to use more at home, it also became the driver for helping us break away from the restaurant problem. Eventually, we would use vacuum sealing, dehydrating, curing, and caning to augment storage life. This is essential in keeping items like homemade granola, candies, and crackers from going bad due to humidity.

The Longer the Storage, The More Learned

The last two bullets are where the hard learnings kicked in. Let’s talk about storage time first. You can technically store items, properly packaged, in deep storage for more than a year. There are lots of people who practice a homestead-like lifestyle and groups like the US military do this. We say homestead-like as the practice of homesteading, which drove the expansion of the US, was outlawed in totality by 1986.

It takes equipment, time, learning, long-term planning, organization, and a lot of extra space to make use of these techniques successfully. We decided this wasn’t going to work for us except on a few special occasions. Instead, we put a cap of 1 year on all raw items with a maximum of 3 months for extra portions and store-bought pre-packaged food.

We recognized one of the keys to making extra portions was finding ways to store them. There were also the ingredients that needed long-term storage. The first obvious choice was to freeze both the portions and any non-shelf-stable ingredients. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed. To that end, we will do another post on freezing ‘how to’ but first we will talk about our learnings.

Bad Comes From Air

We immediately learned any items exposed to air in a freezer, except liquids, can exhibit freezer burn in as little as 2 months. Being exposed to air didn’t mean storing in BPA-free plastic containers was safe. Any exposure to air, be it air in a container or out of it, had the same effect. In the beginning, this limited us to only freezing items like soups, pasta sauces and dishes, rice, and cooked vegetables. Cooked and raw meats, poultry, and fish all needed extra protection if the goal was storage over a couple of months.

As mentioned before, this meant some sort of vacuum sealing or other protection method. We learned this was very easy and freed up a lot of space but due to the density of the information, requires its post to explain. Vacuum sealing something dry and hardy like cooked sausage is not hard. Vacuum sealing soft or wet items like bread and raw fish is problematic. Again, that is another post that we will link here after it becomes available

It’s All About Management

The key here was managing stock and using what we had efficiently. It turned out to be no different than managing a home project or budget but with some twists. The primary difference with the management of these items was because they were out of sight, they were out of mind.

Tips for Managing Storage:

• Find an app or other way of documenting what is in mid to long-term storage and keep it up to date with the expiration date you need to use it by.
• Set up a reminder on your phone or calendar to meal plan twice a week. Write the menu for 3-4 days’ worth of meals on an information radiator such as a small whiteboard or Google calendar.
• Use your meal planning to ‘drain’ your reserves. This way you begin figuring out how fast things are moving through storage.
• Once a week, set up a cooking schedule to replenish your reserves from your frozen raw ingredients and pantry. 
• Keep some store-bought items such as pasta, sauce, frozen pizza, and lunch meats in the mix as needed to relieve the pressure to cook when life gets too busy.
• Label everything that goes into deep cold storage and keep it up to date. Empirically, we feel we have a better chance of finding Amelia Airheart, D. B. Cooper, or Jimmy Hoffa than something buried, un-labeled in the back of a full freezer. 
• Try to have your meal planning make use of all currently stored in a 2-3 month period which means don’t over-create dishes for mid to long-term storage. 

It’s Been a Long Post!

This has been a long post and if you are still with us thank you and we hope it has been of some help. We will break down items here in more detail in future posts. There are many nuances we didn’t speak to here due to that. We found optimizing storage and planning are not easy subjects to learn. It is at this point you are becoming what we define as a chef by helping the home restaurant run efficiently and at scale.  It is a learning curve. 

The post Better Ways To Store Food By Usage first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Chefs, Cooks, and Celebrities…Oh My!

Chefs make their living creating food and running restaurants. In many countries, they are also stars in the media. Some teach Master Classes. Others will tell you their tale of how they spent their lives in pursuit of certain foods and cuisines. For others, they are entertainers and show people who have reached a pinnacle in their career to the point of making it an art form. The takeaway is that they are all in the business of selling something, whether a lifestyle or an experience. That isn’t always helpful to the home cook on a calorie or financial budget. 

The role of a chef in the restaurant industry is different than that of a cook. A chef is an executive-level position in a restaurant while a cook is a person who follows recipes. That doesn’t mean a chef doesn’t cook or a cook doesn’t help manage a budget or create new dishes. In a small restaurant, the owner may do both. Then of course the question becomes why did we bring this up distinction?

Become a Great Cook First

Over our journey, we stopped trying to play chef and learned to cook. We then became our own ‘chefs’ as our knowledge grew about the economies and management of our home kitchen. When we tried to learn everything at once, we bought things we didn’t use. We created waste due to food spoilage or a lack of understanding of things like use-by dates. By focussing on cooking, we learned to make it easy, what we wanted, and then learned to create economies of scale in doing it.

We start here because we feel others like us want to be a celebrity chef when all we need to do is learn to cook. One of the biggest complaints we hear from people is that nothing turns out right. Through learning to cook the other parts will follow. Don’t get upset if something doesn’t work out and the dish you are creating doesn’t come out like a celebrity chef. Reading recipes and understanding cooking jargon is hard enough.

It’s Like Learning a New Language

Disclaimer: Instead of posting a list of everything in our post, we will just link what has been done by others. We don’t necessarily agree or disagree with the brand of products selected for them. The range of information is what we feel is important to create a viable working kitchen from the ground up. 

Like many things we looked into, getting alignment on terminology was difficult. Ok, so the recipe says blanch. What does that mean? Sometimes the instructions in recipes are typos or simply wrong. We had to learn what was correct and what wasn’t. Reading recipes can be so challenging that it does need its own blog post. This is a small to large list of terminology to start with as it is good to know. 

Some Light Reading

• The Basics
• A Little More Info
• The Big List For You Cooking School Folks

Buying Into A Lifestyle Versus Just Buying Tools

Before we present this next set of lists, a caution and call out, we have no problem shelling out large sums of money for good or necessary equipment. We also have no problem being as frugal as possible to save money. Our blog is about making things simple and solving problems. This is one area where we feel that paying high prices for a name on a pot handle, range or blender may not be worth it. Try to start with being as simple as possible.

Your budget and life are yours but buying top-dollar equipment doesn’t necessarily mean you will produce better food. There are also exceptions where you will want a name brand and high-end for durability, warranty, or ease of use. You don’t need to buy the hype or endorsement of a lifestyle to produce quality food at home. The principle of caveat emptor applies in purchasing any equipment and tools.  Do your homework and read the reviews to save time, money, and frustration. 

Look to the Pros, Not at the Labels

If you look at the back of the house in a restaurant we very much doubt you will see high-end home equipment. What you will see are tools of the trade that get used and abused every day. Over time we learned we could get a lot of what we needed from restaurant stores instead of high-end merchants. Do your homework and you will save money and frustration. In contrast, you can take away my Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer when you pry it from my cold dead hands as it was worth every penny to us.

Some Resources

• The Basics
• Another Good Essential List
• More than a Starter Starter List

Don’t Commit Before You Are Sure

Beyond this, there are specialty items you will want. Before you commit to the specialty items, ask yourself if you will really use them. For example, our dehydrator is an essential piece of equipment for us. We rarely used the bread machine we owned for over 10 years before we realized it was just much easier to make bread by hand. You may enjoy an air fryer, or it may just sit there. what we learned is it is really easy to get up in the romanticism that you will use something versus learning the hard way you won’t.

Oh, There Will Be Questions

These starter lists lead us to other questions. As we started to learn more, we started to ask ourselves about processes in recipes. What is a slow rolling boil vs a simmer? What is cooking using medium-high heat when the heating elements or burners are all different sizes? We will address that in another post to keep this one to basics. 

A Specific Callout; Knives

One last note on knives. Knives are very personal and usually one of the biggest expenses in setting up a working kitchen. Find what fits your hand, is good quality holds an edge, and will last. We all have different hand sizes and dexterity. Make sure you are buying something you can use. Just because a super chef endorsed it, it’s a specific brand or type of steel doesn’t mean it will work in your hand. Your knives are one of the most important and most used tools in the kitchen. We found it is worth spending some extra money on if needed as fit and longevity are really important.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have covered some terminology and basic equipment. We hope it is both just enough to get started with and just enough to prompt further questions. Cooking your good food from scratch is not always easy. It is however rewarding, can save you money, and help you with a calorie budget for better portion control. Getting set up to do it should not be complicated or budget-breaking.

The post On How To Get Started Cooking Better first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

It’s All About Heat Transfer

What we learned was that it came down to a few things such as:

• Volume and surface area of the item we were cooking.
• The amount of BTUs or heat your cooktop can produce.
• The amount of cooling you could apply through methods like an ice bath.

Here is where the bullets above come from. Only certain things can be cooked in large quantities at home. We caveat that your tastes may be different but recreating some recipes in the large is just not easy. The volume and surface area of the food combined with the type of cooking method you can apply is the limiting factor. The size of the surface area is what makes temperature management problematic. These issues are due to the thermodynamics concept of specific heat capacity which you can take our word about for now or read more here, here, and one more here.  

A Couple Examples

Let’s talk about a couple of examples. This will be some nerd speak but is necessary to understand why some things do and don’t scale. 

It is easy to increase a roast in volume from 4 lbs. to 6 lbs. The cooking method or cooling doesn’t need to be modified to work. Roasting is a slower cooking method designed for high volume-to-surface area ratios. If you increase the roast by 2 lbs. from 4 to 6 the result will still be close enough no changes are needed other than a bit more time in the oven.

Rather fry up some extra chicken or fish? These items have the opposite volume-to-surface area ratios as a roast. Frying, searing, and sauteing all are high-heat, fast cooking methods. When you add too much volume, most home equipment can’t provide the required BTUs to cook the food. The cooking method has to be modified to allow for batches that require more time.

What Worked and What Didn’t

 Worked:

• Roasting meats, fish, and poultry scales well. It is just as easy to make ten pork chops as it is two. 
• One-dish items such as Lasagna, Meatloaf, Casseroles,  Stews, Sauces, Soups, and Chili all scale well with a caveat (see below, Didn’t Work)
• Vegetables, meats, and potatoes on the grill. 
• Instant pots, Slow Cookers, and Dutch ovens all work well to scale up portions without increasing labor. 
• Same-sized baked goods such as rolls, crackers, and granola bars were easy to scale up. 
• Items that could be cooked on a griddle like pancakes and toaster biscuits (aka English Muffins)

 Didn’t Work:

• Sauces and soups containing pasta or noodles.
• Rice other than minute rice.
• Increasing the size of baked goods like muffins or other quick breads.
• High-temperature dishes that require sauteing or searing. 
• Pan frying or deep fat frying due to having to work in batches.
• Items that take up a lot of cooking area such as tortillas and pancakes due to the need to work in batches. 

Why didn’t some of these work? The answer is that they either didn’t save time, had to be modified extensively or just plain didn’t turn out. Time savings was a large part of what didn’t work for some. Our premise in our other post is that for this to work effectively, it should save time. Some recipes are just too labor intensive when scaled up to be worth the time cost of extra portions.

Starches In Liquids Create Unique Problems

We also ran into some specifics with starches. Items like rice and soup with noodles are problematic enough to require a separate post. What confounded us was that some rice like Minute Rice or Basmati created completely different results than say Jasmine or Wild Rice. Here it is TL;DR; for now.

• Due to soups and sauces being mostly hot liquid, adding noodles to them will result in overcooking. This is because the larger the volume of soup or sauce, the harder it is to cool it to stop the cooking process
• Rice can be problematic at scale with standard pots and pans due to thermal transference. What ends up happening is part of the rice will undercook and part will overcook.

A Few Tips From Lessons Learned

Here are some tips to help when scaling up:

• Don’t increase the recipe yield by more than 4-6 extra servings.
• When possible, keep the same size baking dishes but use two to scale up. This keeps cooking times and methods consistent. 
• Portion soups and sauces immediately into separate containers.
• Meats will be easier to slice if cooled in the refrigerator. Serve what you need, and place the remaining in the refrigerator before portioning. 
• Before you make it, think about how it will be reheated. Microwaving soup will result in a good outcome but won’t be so great for fried fish.

Lastly, make sure it tastes ok, the recipe is ok and it will be ok after reheating before you scale up your portions. This was one of our hard lessons. If you make 20 portions of baked beans and the recipe doesn’t work, you are out all that labor. When you make 16 portions of something with a cream sauce, realize it may be a pain to keep it from separating when reheated. We will cover how we handle that in another post of sodium citrate. 

The Take Away

Creating additional portions of food is not always as simple as adding more ingredients. In this post, we have covered only part of some of what we learned. In this post, we have discussed what has worked, and what hasn’t, and some reasons behind each. We hope it helps you ask yourself some great questions before starting to do this. Our additional hope it will help cut down wasted food while providing a better time management tool for working with your calorie budget.

The post Tips To Easily Make Extra Portions first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.