How to Set Up Your Kitchen for Batch Cooking

Bags beat tubs, for reasons that are not obvious

Space. A litre of chili in a flat frozen bag occupies roughly a third of the volume of the same litre in a tub, because a tub is mostly air and wall. A freezer drawer holds three times as many meals.

Thawing speed. A flat bag is perhaps 2 cm thick; a tub is 10. Heat travels from the surface inward, so a flat bag thaws in a bowl of cold water in forty minutes where a tub takes a day in the fridge. This is the difference between deciding to eat something at five o'clock and deciding yesterday.

Filing. Flat frozen bags stand on edge like books. You can see every label at once, which is what stops a freezer becoming a geological deposit.

How to do it: fill the bag, press the air out, seal, lay flat on a tray until solid - a few hours - then stand it on edge in a drawer.

Where tubs are still right: anything delicate that would be crushed, anything you will reheat directly in the container, and anything liquid enough to leak.

Vacuum sealers are genuinely better for long storage - no air means no freezer burn - and are a luxury rather than a necessity. A bag with the air pressed out is 90 per cent as good.

Portion before you freeze, always

The single biggest quality lever in batch cooking, and it is about how many times the food gets heated.

Reheating is the most damaging step in the whole process - proteins tighten, starches retrograde, textures coarsen. The second reheat of the same food is noticeably worse than the first.

Freeze eight portions in one block and the sequence is: thaw all eight, eat two, refrigerate six, reheat them again over the following days. Everything after the first meal has been heated twice.

Freeze in the unit you will actually eat and nothing is ever heated more than once.

Practical sizing:

• Two portions a bag for a household of two eating together.
• One a bag if people eat at different times.
• Components separately where the recipe allows - sauce in one bag, protein in another - which gives you more combinations from the same cooking.

The chili at 2× gives sixteen portions. Eight bags of two, not one large tub.

Labelling, and what to put on the label

A freezer full of anonymous brown blocks is a freezer that gets emptied into a bin once a year. This is not a discipline problem, it is an information problem.

On every label:

1. What it is. "Chili" not "beef".
2. The date it was frozen.
3. How many portions.
4. Any reheating instruction that is not obvious. "Add water" saves you guessing in six weeks.

Masking tape and a marker works and is cheap. Freezer labels are better and peel off cleanly.

Write on the bag before you fill it. Writing on a full, cold, damp bag does not work.

Rough quality windows, which is why the date matters. Everything is safe indefinitely at −18 °C; these are about when it stops being nice:

The store cupboard that makes it possible

Batch cooking depends less on equipment than on not having to shop for six things before you can start.

The six that unlock most of this site, covered in cost per portion and worth repeating:

White pepper, celery salt, smoked paprika, MSG, sodium citrate and a tin of chipotles in adobo. Under £15 total and all of them last months to years.

Plus the ordinary things worth having in quantity:

• Plain and strong bread flour
• Cornflour and baking powder
• Cumin, garlic powder, onion powder, dried oregano, cayenne
• Caster and light brown sugar
• White wine vinegar, cider vinegar, soy sauce
• Mayonnaise, tomato ketchup, mustard
• Instant dried yeast, kept in the freezer where it lasts years

One habit worth adopting: the moment you open a tin of chipotles in adobo, blitz the whole tin and freeze it as cubes. One cube is one chilli's worth. It turns a specialist purchase into a store cupboard staple and stops you buying a tin, using two chillies and throwing the rest away.