Your freezer can be one of your best friends when it comes to preparing holiday food. You can make and freeze dishes and deserts ahead of time to cut down on the hectic holiday food preparation and cooking. You can also freeze leftovers in order to reduce waste. Finally, you can prepare extra meals that will be easy to eat during the holiday rush.
Some foods do freeze better than others, and there are some other considerations to make when freezing foods, such as whether or not to freeze them cooked or uncooked, whether to alter your spices, when par-baking or cooking is needed and how to flash freeze and store your food.
With both Thanksgiving and Christmas on their way, I want to take a look at freezing holiday food. Let us start with potatoes.
Potatoes can be tricky to freeze, because if they aren’t prepared correctly, they will get mushy and separate in the freezer. Mashed potatoes usually does well, especially if it has a high enough fat content to counteract the starch. You can use my basic mashed potatoes recipe if you like. It always freezes well, especially if you honor the following tips.
Once your potatoes are cooked and mashed with butter, milk and salt, allow them to cool to room temperature (just warm is okay if you are in a rush). Next, scoop the potatoes into the cups of the muffin tins and freeze uncovered for about 30 minutes. Once this initial freezing is done, you can pop out the individual servings and place them together in a freezer bag.
Using the muffin cups not only serves the purpose of making the convenient individual servings, but it also helps the potatoes freeze and thaw more evenly, avoiding the typical ice crystals and mush that often happens with potatoes.
You can read more blog posts by Mary Ann Romans here!
Related Articles: