I have done this with a food in a vacuum sealer, and it’s better than that Swanson’s crap. Nobody is arguing that the frozen food, for the most part (not all of it), is heavily engineered. (There’s plenty of small-scale frozen foods you can get here are basically exactly like the fresh thing, only frozen. For example, in Chicago there’s Alexandra’s frozen pierogi. They are hand made, flash frozen, and last forever in the freezer, as do any pierogi you and I could make as long as we properly seal them.)
The point we’re arguing about is that you can’t freeze real food to eat later. Of course you can, and much of the time it ends up being better than the commercial stuff. I have no doubt the engineered stuff can last much longer with less degradation of product, but 8 weeks is hardly a test. I don’t think you’ll start noticing it until 6 months to even a year.
Do they still sell those hot dogs that are stuffed with chili? The hot dog would feel cool enough to eat until you got to the hot lava chili on the inside. I wonder how many lawsuits that brought on.
Yes, of course you can. I’m not saying anything contradictory.
I am saying you cannot make anything like the wide selection of commercial frozen foods; that the foods a home cook can make and freeze-preserve are a limited subset of home-cooked foods; that most complex frozen foods absolutely require highly engineered components to survive freezing and come out looking and tasting edible.
Was there an implied promise not to shoot hot lava out of the dog and into your mouth? Sorry, best I could do on short notice. Oh, and were they foot long dogs? Sorry, got to go . . .
I’ve found a brand of frozen meals that appears, on the surface at least, to be healthful (“Gourmet Dining”). There are several “flavors”, most of them containing pasta, chicken, and vegetables, and a packet of sauce mix.
Aside from the sauce, I judge them to be healthful by the fairly short list of ingredients. From one such package, for example:
The sauce, on the other hand, has a lengthy ingredient list full of the usual suspects. A serving has 19% DV of sodium, 12% of which comes from the sauce.
Interesting note, though: They recently changed the instructions on the package. Formerly, it had stove-top skillet instructions and microwave instructions. Now, they’ve eliminated the microwave instructions and give stove-top only. I still cook in the microwave (often adding additional frozen veggies as well), with seemingly good results.
Dude, you are just plain wrong. I freeze completely prepared foods all the time and they come out perfect, sometimes stored for months and years. See I have a vacuum sealer. Keeping the air out is the key to shelf life. With a home vacuum sealer, food looks and tastes great for much longer than the most secure wrapping can make them. I freeze soups, stews, whole baked ziti, creamed spinach … and defrost them in the microwave, for a few examples. It is air that damages frozen foods, for the most part. Keep out the air and you can manhandle frozen foods quite a bit.
In sum my experience shows that you are completely wrong in every respect.
I will give you this much: cream sauces and similar emulsions don’t always do well in the freezer. Frozen fettucini alfredo? Um…no thanks. I really do tip my hat to the food scientists for getting something that approximates an alfredo sauce to freeze and not separate when heated. Frozen gluten free cream of mushroom soup concentrate seemed like a good idea at the time, but apparently corn starch slurry loses its thickening ability when frozen and thawed. Live and learn. (And some additional corn starch when it was reheated fixed it up fine, but that was a stovetop procedure, not a microwave one.)
So yes, there *are *limits to freezing food at home. But I don’t think they’re nearly as limited as you think they are, with some practice and the right packaging equipment.
8 weeks? Shit…I think the oldest foods that I’ll eat from my deep freeze are going on 3 years…
In your first post you said nobody could freeze and reheat a delicious home burrito. Then when everyone said they reheat delicious frozen burritos all the time, you quickly switched to nobody being able to freeze food for weeks or months. But that’s not true either. I don’t know anybody who freezes leftovers for less than weeks or months.
In my experience, virtually any frozen homemade food properly packaged will reheat better than commercial food because the ingredients are almost certain to be much higher quality. When I reheat dinner from many months ago it looks and tastes great. Contrarily, I don’t think I’ve ever seen processed microwaveable food look good or tastey.
It doesn’t alter the DNA of food items any more or less than conventional cooking. Microwave photons don’t have enough energy to break chemical bonds; all they do is heat your food, same as boiling, frying, grilling, or conventional-oven baking.
I remember my mom getting one of those mass-forward emails claiming that plastic containers, even the ones labeled as “microwave safe”, should never ever be nuked for fear of Vague Horrible Things happening to you. Is there any real credence to that, or should I tell mom not to sweat it?
And I’ll stand by that if anyone wants to do it the way commercial ones are handled and not for a shorter freeze time, without interruptions, and without coddling the reheating process.
Make your tasty burrito, throw it in the freezer for four months, and nuke it on high for a minute. Get back to me.
You can probably use another thickener that can hold up to freezing. I’ve never tried it, but arrowroot apparently survives the freezing process quite well. And I believe xanthan gum would work quite well, too.
Right. So if you start substituting ingredients other than those the recipe calls for, you can create a food substance that can tolerate freezing and reheating. Food engineering carries this to extremes because the manufacturers are selling maximum convenience at low cost. People want cheap food items they can handle casually, store indefinitely, nuke in minutes and get an acceptable taste, appearance and mouthfeel from. That can’t be achieved with most home ingredients and recipes unless exceptional effort is used in initial prep, storage conditions and reheating or finish prep - at which point you are no longer saving much money or time.
Frankly, I can make a new pot of almost any sauce quicker than I’ve ever been able to thaw and finish a frozen block of it. About the only thing I freeze any more is blocks of particularly good stock.
I think individual positions on this might map to ability as a cook and quality preference in foods. If you eat a lot of frozen food and don’t like to cook every day, freezing batches of your own stuff is certainly a step up. But it doesn’t change the fact that commercial frozen food bears almost no resemblance to what you would make yourself. It just comes out of the microwave looking that way.
Sorry, best I could do on short notice. Oh, and were they foot long dogs?