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.

Impulse Buying Wasn’t The Answer

First, we will talk about what we did wrong that we learned the hard way. We found is there was no ‘easy’ button to help new cooks create a pantry of items they need. We had hoped we could find a series of top 20 lists of what people stocked in their short, mid, and long-term storage. The more we searched we could find some here and there but nothing that fit us. There wasn’t one and for good reason. The reason is because everyone has different calorie budgets, family sizes, tastes, etc. It was the same problem with understanding portion sizes.

When we started, I decided to go all in. In my mind, I came up with all the things I wanted to make and started buying and storing them. That includes things like cake flour, multiple types of dried fruit for granola bars, four types of pasta noodles, and multiple cans of tuna. It was a big mistake. I, realized, well, I have only baked one cake in my life. It wasn’t like we were packing for the Oregon Trail where there wouldn’t be any grocery store for the next 2,000+ miles. It was a wastefully impulsive way to start but it did create change.

Impulse did Enforce a Change

While it did force us to cook more at home to use up what I had bought. This helped us start to produce more at home. there are better ways to approach this. We learned we had to think about food from a storage point of view. It also made us realize just how many meals we needed to keep on hand and didn’t. Out of our experiments, we realized that our food had to be segmented by usage time.

Breaking It Down Isn’t Hard

What we wanted to have on hand:

• Fresh items to use within 5-10 days. These include meats, dairy, vegetables, etc. These are your most perishable items. They are all ingredients in the meals we intend to prepare.
• Intermediate life items that we needed on hand to create meals. These items we wanted to use up in 2 weeks to 3 months. The items range from cheeses to condiments like mayonnaise as well as pre-cooked frozen chicken. 
• Intermediate life items were fresh homemade meal substitutes such as canned chili, soups, and frozen pizzas. These are the buffer foods that keep us from going out by giving us something quick that is on hand when life goes sideways.
• Long-life items that will last up to a year such as condiments such as ketchup to items such as flour, sugar, and salt. In this category also go bulk spices, and dried meals such as macaroni and cheese.

Notice nothing on this list has anything to do with extra portions or meals we made ourselves. To produce meals or augment meals we needed these ingredients which we considered staples. Meals and shelf-stable items like home canned goods are another part of the items we keep on hand but are complex enough to need their own write-up.

Getting to the right mix:

We can’t tell you what will work for you. That is a function of how much space you have, how much you cook, and what you make the most of. We can give you two rubrics to help you decide how much to store and what.

• The more you have on hand the more you will be able to make.
• The longer an item is stored the less likely it will be used.

It is the second bullet point that is the gotcha. We are not homesteaders or preppers. Our goal was not a year’s or more worth of food on hand. Shelf-stable foods such as Mac and Cheese (Boxed Dinners) and canned soups can be stored for a year or more. Due to this extended shelf life, there was never pressure to use them before they spoiled. We had to learn to enforce our own rules to use them within 2-3 months of purchase.

Getting Started is Easy:

You are probably already doing much of the leg work to do this. Yes, that’s correct, it’s your weekly shopping list. By adding a couple more intentional aspects to it, you can take advantage of the work you are already doing. Here’s an approach we eventually found worked and what didn’t.

Things that help:

• Identify what staples are for your calorie budget, portions, and cooking needs. It will be the items you are buying most frequently.
• Think of at least two or three uses for something before you buy in quantity. An example of this is flour tortillas. Tortillas are a blank slate that can be used as a wrap, baked as a cracker, or even made as a quick quesadilla. 
• Remember staples include all types of food from condiments like ketchup and mustard to pre-packaged meals such as soup. 
• Choose package sizes to fit your needs but also your space. We bake all the time but we will never buy a 10 lb sack of flour even though we may go through all of it before it goes bad. This is simply a trade-off for storage space. 
• Staples also includes items that give you flexibility. Having frozen vegetables, fruits, or even frozen pre-cooked chicken on hand gives you easy ways to augment meals and dishes on an as-needed basis.
• Only buy two to three types of things in categories such as rice and pasta until you start to run out of them. Most of us don’t need extensive supplies of different noodles such as Spaghetti, Fettuccine, Elbows, Shells, etc. Having two or three on hand leaves a lot of creativity while keeping storage space maximized. 

Things that didn’t help:

• Buying food out of cooking ideas that aren’t actionable. It is very easy to think you will use a more exotic item but we have found, until you see it on the grocery list a couple of times, it’s probably not a staple.
• Using sale prices as the only motivator to increase the amount you buy may or may not produce the desired outcome. Sales come and go but what is in your fridge or pantry has a date and is taking up space. 
• Overstocking of staples can lead to accidentally hiding items. This problem leads to buying more of the items you already have and don’t need.
• Staples mean things you use over and over again. These are not items to buy in quantity if you are not sure how much you will like them. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed how to start planning for a pantry and storage for staples. By watching your grocery list you can start to fill out what are staples for you. Once your staples are identified you can start purchasing items in bulk and take advantage of economies of scale. As discussed, this will also help eliminate waste on guessing what will work versus knowing what you use all the time. We will follow up this post with some thoughts on those economies of scale at a later date. 

The post How To Sort Out Kitchen Staples 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.

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.