Chef warns how long you should actually keep food in the freezer

Maintaining a healthy, tasty, and efficient diet can be tricky when you’re only fending for yourself, but it gets considerably more challenging when you’re managing family meals.

One of the best ways to get on top of the routine is to make the most of the tools available, and one cooking-based content creator from Ireland reckons the freezer is your secret weapon.

Growing up in rural Ireland in the 1980s, Lou Robbie remembers her granny’s ‘very, very traditional Irish’ cooking – from beef strew to brown bread – and specifically just how much she used the freezer.

Lou Robbie (Ella Miller/PA)

“Processed and pre-packaged didn’t exist. It was all very wholesome, organic, natural food,” says the Galway-based chef and content creator. “They had a farm and my granny would make all her own breads and cakes – everything was made from scratch.”

She grew up watching both her granny and mum batch cook and freeze leftovers at home in Tipperary. “Even after my grandad has passed away, she would still make her own beef stew, portion it for her own dinners and freeze the stew. She would never make one loaf of brown bread, ever. She’d make four and freeze three.

“My mum does the exact same thing as my granny,” says the mum-of-two, who found social media success with @LittleLouCooks, sharing homemade lunchbox snack recipes with other parents, often involving the freezer.

Cooking and meal planning this way is “a brilliant way to save money and waste less food… and it’s not difficult, it’s just a great habit.

“My granny wasted nothing – we would joke about it!”

Now Robbie, who spent many years working as a professional chef, has published her debut cookbook, Make & Freeze, sharing freezeable, family-friendly recipes (think chicken and leek pie, pizza scones and no-bake caramel bars) and insists it’s not as time-consuming to batch cook as you might think.

“I’m not baking every week, I’m doing this every three weeks and I’ll do a couple of things together at the same time,” she says, “and they have to be snacks that my children [Meabh, 10, and Hamish, seven] will eat because there’s no point in making them if they don’t like them.”

So what are Robbie’s tips for using the freezer more effectively?

Start afresh

“Sometimes the freezer gets a bit out of control, and then you actually don’t want to go near it,” says Robbie. “So I would get a big container, empty everything out and go through it. Discard anything that has no label on it. It might be bolognaise and God knows how long its been in there.

“If you can defrost the freezer at the same time. That’s brilliant.”

Meal plan for the week

While in the summer months her family are more relaxed, in term time Robbie writes a meal plan on Sundays for Monday to Friday.

“If you write five days of meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner, roughly of what you’re going to have, and knowing what’s in the freezer already, then you can plan on what to cook on what days. The meal plan dictates the shopping list for the week.

“It’s about habit forming, if you’ve never made a meal plan before, sometimes it can be very daunting. But if you did it for four weeks, you can reuse the meal plans for the next month if you’re happy with them. You’ll most likely have 20 dinners that you know your family will eat and enjoy.

“And then you’re in control of the spend too – because we’re all watching our pennies with the cost-of-living crisis.”

Double or triple recipes

Robbie encourages home cooks to double or triple a recipe that your family like, to put the leftovers in the freezer.

“There’s no point in making one lasagne – have a second lasagne dish and double it up, portion it and freeze the cooked portions,” suggests Robbie.

“Make 24 muffins, if I make 12 they disappear. It’s just about getting into that mindset. ”

Plus, “I think every busy household should have a slow cooker,” she says.

Label and date everything

“Even a small freezer can be effective but then when you start to make things for the freezer, you write the label on the bag and you put the date on it.

“A general rule of thumb is, for a standing freezer, I would put things in there for three months, and then a deep freeze, like a chest freezer, for six months.

“I like to put things in Ziploc bags, because they take less space than containers, and then lay them flat, and then you can stack them in. And hopefully, then you could actually see what you have in the freezer.”

Defrost in time

“I like to defrost the night before, because a lot of the time it’s for school snacks. So in the evening, around 6pm when you’re making your dinner, set a reminder on your phone from Monday to Thursday, especially in the school term, to go to the freezer and defrost what you need.”

Meat should be defrosted in the fridge, she notes, but low-risk foods like a baked good can be left on the worktop to defrost overnight. “It’ll be safe,” she says. “Then you’re not rushing to pull something out of the freezer on a busy school or work morning, that’s when it gets chaotic.

Effective labelling is essential (Alamy/PA)

Feel good about it

“It’s that feeling of being in control, a little bit of power that you have, because we’re all trying to feed our kids better food, less processed and more homemade.

“It’s really hard to do all homemade all the time, but knowing that [your child] has got some homemade snacks in his lunchbox during the week, knowing that we’re going to have at least two homemade dinners in the week, that’s a great feeling.

“I think that’s a really powerful feeling for a parent – you might not be able to do more than that, but even having that is better than none at all.”