How do you avoid gross texture changes in freezing food?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been trying to make bigger amounts of home made food lately and just freeze the leftovers and reheat down the line when the dish sounds enticing again, I’m running into some really gross texture changes!

Pasta dish with cream sauce-Not sure what went wrong here, the sauce seemed to separate and not mix back together well and the noodles while not too bad were just blech.

Imitation crab salad-The mayo totally lost emulsion, which actually was not a big deal since the imitation crab kept its texture. Just seemed like it was made with oil instead of mayo, still good.

Potatoes au gratin-Oh lord the potatoes turned into watery sponges, I’m gonna have to toss this to the dogs.
So what exactly is the deal?

2

It’s because it’s freezing too slowly and unevenly. The different ingredients freeze at different rates and temperatures, and so as the ice crystals form the texture gets ruined.

The trick is to freeze it fast and hard. There’s not many ways to do this at home. You probably don’t have a blast freezer, and it’s not worth the investment. A more practical thing to do is to divide the food into smaller portions. Divide them up into ziplock bags, and lay them flat so there’s as much surface area as possible, so they freeze as fast as possible. As a bonus, once frozen you can stack them up like magazines! You’ll never eliminate the problem, but you might reduce it.

If you’re feeling dangerous, you can flash freeze food with liquid nitrogen. Observe all safety procedures, etc. etc.

3

As you discovered, emulsions often don’t freeze well.

4

As for an explanation for why emulsions don’t freeze well, I will try to explain:

Emulsions are rather unstable substances. They are mixtures of two substances that ordinarily will not mix. The way they are made to mix is by making substance into tiny droplets, where the movement of the other substance is able to keep those droplets from combine. When you freeze something, the substances start to move less, so the droplets combine and separate from the other substance. Thawing the emulsion out doesn’t reverse this process.

Now you may ask, “what about emulsifiers”? Emulsifiers are a third substance that reduce the amount of motion needed to maintain an emulsification. But they can’t reduce it to nothing.

There are some emulsions that freeze well, but they are relatively rare, and happen because the emulsifier actually freezes in place, keeping the two substances separated.

I’m sure others can do a better job of explaining this, but I hope this gives you at least an idea of what’s going on.

5

Creamy stuff don’t freeze too good. :wink:

I’ve fallen in love with the gallon freezer bag method - use a gallon freezer bag, fill it no more than half full when oriented for filling. Then close it, squeezing out all the excess air. Lay it down on a cookie sheet and smoosh the content into the corners so you have a nice even layer no more than an inch thick. Freeze, still on the cookie sheet, until it’s solid, and then you can move it off the cookie sheet and into a more convenient freezer spot.

If you’re storing for one, quart sized freezer bags work well. If you use storage bags instead of freezer bags, or if you store frozen food for a long time, you’ll want to double bag it to keep air out. I have some things which are individual portion sizes frozen in storage sandwich bags, and then I put those bags into a gallon freezer bag. Keeps freezer burn at bay longer, and also keeps small like items together.

As **Chipacabra **notes, these bags have the added bonus of being easy to stack, although I prefer to stick them into the bottom of my deep freeze standing up on edge - I have a “file” of food, which makes it easy to literally flip through them like you would a file drawer to see what I’ve got in there!

But yes, the root of your problem in the OP is that you’re trying to freeze stuff that just doesn’t freeze well. I can freeze a whole lot of things, but not everything. I’ve been known to throw a bunch of about-to-go-bad fruits into my Vita Mix and then freeze the slurry in ice cube trays. Again into a gallon freezer bag, and I’ve got “fruit cubes” for smoothies or no-added-sugar “popsicles” for the little one. I boil off most of the liquid when making stock and freeze cubes of stock concentrate - 1 cube of stock makes 1 cup of stock for easy homemade stock without using too much freezer space. Chili, stew, non-creamy soups, rice/rice pilaf, mashed potatoes (which yes, are technically an emulsion, but if you heat them gently and add a skosh more milk or cream and stir vigorously, they reheat okay), pulled pork, corned beef hash, tomato based pasta sauce, baked chicken, lasagne…all freeze just fine.

Stuff with large quantities of cream or mayo, not so much. Cooked pasta is hit or miss, and I’ll generally freeze just the sauce and make the noodles fresh. Fruit is only worth freezing if you’re going to use it in smoothies or shakes later.Plain vegetables (onions, bell peppers, carrots), due to their high water content, only freeze well if you plan on cooking them when you use them, and work best if you cut them before freezing them, because they will be limp and hard to handle when they thaw. The cookie sheet method again - cut your veg in your most commonly used shape, spread into a single layer on the cookie sheet to freeze, and then scoop into 1/2 cup portions in bags.

Freezing is a great tool for cooking cheaper and lazier, but it’s not an all-purpose tool. But once you learn what works, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money.

6

You just can’t freeze potatoes. You’d think so, with all the frozen potato products out there, but they have been frozen professionally. Now, I have frozen mashed potato patties to be used within a month (and the trick to that is beat them with some cream cheese). They’re thin and really only good as a base underneath meat and gravy.

Before you whip up a big batch of something with the idea of freezing it, google ‘can I freeze…’ and read more than one answer, there are often tips on doing it successfully.

7

Or you could blast it with a CO2 fire extinguisher, but of course that would get very expensive very quickly.

8

I don’t even try to freeze anything with mayo in it, or potatoes, or cooked rice, or cooked pasta.

I DO freeze spaghetti sauce and my husband is capable of heating up the sauce and boiling some vermicelli if he’s on his own for dinner. He likes spaghetti a lot more than I do.