Meal prepping can be a great time saver, but it’s typically best suited to those following stringent diets.
Batch cooking evokes images of gym bros whipping up container after container of boiled chicken, rice and broccoli, but it obviously isn’t limited to bland macro-chasing meals.
One mum shared how she follows the practice for her kid’s school lunches, posting to Facebook that she often prepares sandwiches up to five weeks ahead of time.
Elsie, the mum in question, said she batch prepares the sandwiches and then freezes them. They’re then taken out one by one to defrost in time for her daughter’s lunch that day.
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The post was accompanied with an image of several sarnie stacks waiting to go int he freezer. While it’s no doubt a time saver and greatly convenient, not everyone agreed it’s a great idea.
"Just to be clear; I don't expect my child to eat soggy sandwiches. They defrost well overnight,” Elsie explained.
"I also don't expect my child to eat frozen sandwiches. They are defrosted the night before."
She added that the trick works best with ‘foods with a low water content’, meaning the likes of lettuce and cucumber are adding post-thaw.
The comments, as they often do, took Elsie to task for the strategy. One suggested that the meat-filled sandwiches might not be ‘safe to freeze and eat defrosted’. Others suggested that defrosting the sandwiches would lead to ‘soggy bread’, and some doubted the sandwiches could retain a decent flavour and texture after five weeks in the freezer.
Most of these concerns are unfounded. Defrosted bread will only be soggy if it has the water content to dampen it, and in most cases it won’t. Plenty of sandwich ingredients are more than capable of being frozen and defrosted weeks later without spoiling, tasting weird or having a strange texture either.
Sandwiches also thaw remarkably quickly. Elsie could easily take one from the freezer in the morning, put it in her daughter’s lunchbox, and have it adequately thawed by the time lunch rolls around.
Packed lunches are a peculiar battleground for parents, with strong opinions about what should and shouldn’t go into one, along with much-hawked beliefs that a packed lunch is always better than a hot dinner from the school canteen.
They can also prove a flashpoint between parents and well-meaning teachers. Take this dad, for example, who habitually fills his kid’s lunchbox with sweets and took umbrage with a teacher suggesting they eat the nutritious stuff before the junk.
In response, the dad left a passive-aggressive note in the kid’s lunchbox to take the teacher to task.
Who’d want to be a teacher, eh?
Topics: Social Media, UK Food, News
Rachael Davis