I personally cook almost every single day. But I like freezing stuff, because I don’t like to eat the same stuff for two dinners in a row. Sometimes I can make something from the leftovers. Other times I just want to make something completely different and freeze what I have left over.
I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to make. I think we all know many frozen foods are altered specifically so they do well in the freezing/reheating process. I have no issue with this. But, also, not all frozen foods are. Some are exactly the same as what you’d make at home, but those tend to be small-scale operations that offer that.
You keep saying this is a fact when it isn’t a fact at all. I make no exceptional effort, other than using a vacuum sealer which cost about $75 and lasts for years (I also use it to freeze excess fruits and vegetables from my farm share).
The food comes out great.
And considering my pasta sauce takes four hours to cook, I’m curious that you can make a decent tomato sauce with meat in four minutes as you claim. Four minutes is the time it takes to defrost my pasta sauce in the microwave, you said you can make fresh quicker. Unless you meant, if I confine myself to a narrow subset of barely cooked sauces, I can make it quicker.
The discussion got split, and is split off from the OP to boot. My main point is that commercial frozen food hardly uses a single ingredient that would be found on a home cook’s shelf. Most of these ingredients are benign - just flour, dairy products, etc. that have been modified to handle the unusual conditions. Others are pretty nasty stuff - starting with the excess of salt and sugar used for all the commercial food reasons.
Point me to a small frozen food producer that uses absolutely standard components. Not arguing, I just don’t know of any and the two examples I can think of definitely use a specialized recipe despite their “small, natural, homemade” presentation. ETA: there’s a difference between using Syntho-Flour XL and flour ground and processed differently from grocery store Gold Medal for goods to be frozen - but it’s still a difference from home and most restaurant cooking.
Exactly, and I point I forget. I tend to like a lot of braised stuff that takes 3-4 hours to cook. And the beef stew (or chili or whatnot) that comes out of my freezer, no special tweaks for freezing, is far better than anything canned or frozen I could get.
Back up a bit. Microwave cooking/reheating steams things in a little box, in addition to radiating things.
All pastries/bread, anything crisp, anything that once was or is to be browned, fails in the microwave if thats what youre hoping to find. (For small surface patches, like in some nuke able pot pies, the already-present crisp gets crisp-lie from the heat when it is kept away from exposure.)
On the other hand, vegetables, fish, many preparations with meat and milk are superbly handled. (Potatoes are a peculiarity needing a separate discussin.)
The classic, and deservedly so, cookbook is The Microwave Gourmet by Barbara Kafka. Each recipe is introduced with why it works, and why it makes more sense to use the nuke then stove. Fully one-quarter of the book is a glossary of foods/herbs and portions and comments on how they cook in the nuke world.
The only problem is that she’s using oven powers that are now surpassed, so the timings are off. I can’t remember the math now for the conversion.
I have no doubt that your food taste great and that you have no trouble when freezing it. I believe that the point that most people are trying to make is that big companies that supply massive amounts of product cannot hope to come close to your controlled conditions. The corporate junk they call microwave food is designed to be abused and still not kill you when you heat it up. I’ve seen stock clerks restock the freezers with microwave packages that customer left in a cart and walked away from; god only knows how long they were sitting out and thawing. :eek: It’s a wonder more people don’t die from this crap.
Anyway, it’s the food and where it comes from that is unhealthy; not the microwave process itself.
Alexandra’s Pierogi I already mentioned. I’ve seen the old Polish ladies in the back make it and freeze it. That’s one example. Ingredients: Potatoes, enriched wheat flour, malted barley flour, water, eggs, soybean oil, cheese, salt, black pepper. But I’m sure you’re going to quibble about the “enriched wheat flour” or something like that.
But you are not making things meant to toss in the microwave and then dump on a plate - you are freezing components of dishes intended to do further cooking with, even if “further cooking” is pouring your four-minute-reheated sauce over freshly cooked pasta.
Freeze *the whole meal *in a vacuum pouch, nuke it in one pass without fussing, turning, stirring etc. and put it on a plate. That’s what’s comparable to commercial frozen goods.
These sound pretty good, but I’d be wary of buying them from a grocery chain store where idiots could mishandle them and let them thaw and the refreeze; even the website warns not to refreeze them.
And, if you’re as good a cook as you seem to think you are, you can easily do this yourself. Just parcook the pasta when you combine it and freeze it. Or just cook it all the way through, as most people don’t seem to care about overcooked pasta.
I have no cite for it, but I read just a couple of weeks ago of a study that came to the conclusion that this is very much exaggerated.
Someone told me not too long ago they don’t do well when heated up, but I don’t remember if in was heating in general or using a microwave oven in particular.
Not at all. I’d have to look into the goods to see what’s up. From the web site, it does look as if they are making something very close to restaurant-fresh goods. I suspect that a full review of their cooking and manufacturing process would show some differences between true home or restaurant prep and prep for freezing, but it’s not in their listed ingredients.
These, too, are simple foods intended for further cooking, and are far better sautéed than just nuked hot, and better yet with a sauce or garnish. I’ll concede more clearly that there is certainly a level at which a frozen food need not be too manipulated - starting with fresh-frozen vegetables - and that these are right about at the boundary layer between simple ingredients and the need for engineered ones.
I only buy them from the actual Alexandra’s outlet. But I’ve never heard of anyone having any issues with them. I think the “do not refreeze” is more for reasons of texture and quality than food safety.
It’s in no way exaggerated except perhaps by comparison to other commercial food products. Commercial food production bears little resemblance to home and fresh-restaurant cooking. Frozen goods impose their own requirements that require more “engineering” - which can be a simple as very precise pre-cooking or as involved as substituting most of the ingredients - to turn out a convenient and appealing finished product.
None of this is a deep, dark secret; food engineering has been around since at least Clarence Birdseye. But it’s as unknown to most people as the specific engineering that goes into putting a gallon of gas in your car.
I’d say it’s 75% safety and 10% appeal (and 15% sop to the FDA). A bad thaw/refreeze/thaw/cook cycle can promote lethal contaminant growth.
Granted, it’s about on the same level as worrying about trichinosis from undercooked pork, which I understand not to have occurred in commercial meat in decades. (IIRC, all cases of trich in recent memory were from wild boar and bear meat.)
People don’t normally have issues with things like prepacked lettuce; until someone gets food poisoning from unwashed product. Still, I am tempted look for these Pirogi’s; even risk my life to try them I would.
I don’t know how far they distribute. You might also want to look for Kasia’s Pierogi. It’s a larger scale operation, but still pretty small and with a product quite comparable to Alexandra’s.
ETA: Assuming you’re in Michigan, Kasia’s appears to be available in “Costco, D&W ,Kroger ,Plum Markets ,V.G.'s, Value Center.” Wow, I had no idea they were that big.
As I said I do this all the time. Fully cooked stew with all vegetables and meat would be an example. Tomato soup with pasta and meatballs is another. Chicken stew. Garlic smashed potatoes.
And I see you’ve dialed back the standard of “special care” and “controlled environments” to mean “stirring” and “keeping it in the freezer.” I give. I freely admut thst If I don’t stir defrosted food, it will not be nice to eat - because microwaves heating style is inherently undven. I do not admit that this is in any way different from the instructions on most commercial frozen foods.
Just admit your original proposition - freezing food at home so it is delicious in the microwave is an impossibility – is totally unsupportable. I agree that many commercial foods are excessively processed. But most do not use super secret food science… Just a lot of salt.
Yeah, I wouldn’t quite summarize it as “just a lot of salt.” There’s a good bit more going on for most commercial products. I personally don’t care too much, but I do read labels, and it’s not usually just regular ingredients and a lot of salt. Even non-frozen stuff like cream, which you would think is just cream, is often a mix of cream and carrageenan and gums (guar or xanthan, usually) and stuff like that most of the time. There’s nothing particularly nefarious about those ingredients, in my opinion. (And I will use xanthan in my own cooking occasionally). But when I want cream, I just want plain cream. I think there’s exactly one brand in my usual grocery where cream is just cream and nothing else.
