Speaker A
Go open your freezer right now. I'll wait. If yours looks like most people's, there's a bag of freezer-burned chicken in there from who knows when, half a bag of peas, and a lot of empty space. And meanwhile, you're throwing away brown
Learn 20 practical freezer hacks to extend your groceries' life and save money with Tried & True's expert tips.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Proper freezing techniques drastically reduce food waste and grocery bills.
- Organizing and labeling frozen items improves usability and prevents mystery food disposal.
- Freezing extends the usability of many perishables beyond their typical shelf life.
- Myths about freezer burn and expiration lead to unnecessary food waste.
- Stockpiling sale items and freezing them is a key strategy to save money.
What the video covers
- Freezing bread sliced extends freshness and allows easy toasting from frozen.
- Bananas turning brown can be frozen peeled for baking or smoothies.
- Milk and cheese can be frozen to prevent waste and save money.
- Eggs freeze well out of the shell when portioned in muffin tins.
- Butter and nuts freeze long-term and should be bought on sale for stockpiling.
- Herbs can be frozen chopped in olive oil cubes for easy cooking use.
- Flash freezing items separately prevents clumping and preserves texture.
- Blanching vegetables before freezing preserves color and texture.
- Freezer burn is caused by air exposure, not spoilage, and frozen food remains safe indefinitely.
- Cooking double portions and freezing leftovers saves time and money.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Common Freezer Problems
- 00:58Freezing Bread and Bananas
- 01:42Freezing Milk, Cheese, Eggs, and Butter
- 03:12Herbs, Ginger, Garlic, and Tomato Paste Tricks
- 04:53Flash Freezing and Blanching Vegetables
- 05:46Freezer Myths and Food Safety
- 06:39Cook Once, Eat Twice and Freezing Cooked Foods
- 07:35Organizing Freezer Bags and Using Leftover Scraps
- 09:25Keeping Freezer Full and Using Ice Cube Trays
- 11:01Refreezing Safety and Final Money-Saving Tips
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
bananas, moldy bread, and wilted spinach every single week. The average family tosses out something like $1,500 of food a year. $1,500 straight in the trash. And the whole time, the best food-saving tool ever invented is humming away in your
Speaker A
kitchen, mostly empty. I've raised a family on a tight grocery budget for over 20 years, and I'm telling you, the freezer is how I did it. So today, we're counting down 20 freezer tricks most people have forgotten or never learned.
Speaker A
And number one is the single biggest thing I do to cut my grocery bill. Let's go. Number 20. Freeze your bread, but slice it first. Bread molds on the counter in 4 or 5 days. In the freezer, it keeps for months. The trick is to
Speaker A
slice the loaf before it goes in, because then you pull out two slices at a time and toast them straight from frozen. Nobody at your table will know the difference. I buy bread on markdown, the day-old rack, half price, and freeze
Speaker A
every loaf. Bread is one of the most thrown away foods in the country, and it doesn't have to be.
Speaker A
Number 19. Bananas going brown? That's not garbage. That's banana bread. Peel them, break them in chunks, freeze them in a bag. They keep for months, and they mash up better than fresh for baking. Frozen banana chunks also blend
Speaker A
into a milkshake without any ice cream, which the kids never once complained about. Stores mark down spotty bananas for pennies. Buy those on purpose.
Speaker A
Number 18. Freeze milk. Yes, milk. Most people don't know you can. If milk goes on sale or you're leaving town with half a gallon in the fridge, freeze it. One thing, pour a cup out first, because milk swells when it freezes, and it'll
Speaker A
split the jug. Thawed in the fridge, shake it hard, the fat separates a little and it's fine for drinking and perfect for cooking. Cheese works, too, but grate it first. A block goes crumbly. Grated cheese comes out of the
Speaker A
freezer ready for the pan. Number 17, eggs freeze, just not in the shell. When eggs are cheap, crack them into a muffin tin, one per cup, give each a little stir and freeze. Pop them out into a bag and you've got single eggs
Speaker A
for baking all year. In the shell, they'll crack and make a mess. Out of the shell, they keep close to a year. I started doing this back when egg prices went crazy and I've never stopped.
Speaker A
Number 16, butter. Buy it at the holiday sales, freeze it for the year. Every November and December, butter goes on sale for baking season, sometimes half the regular price. That is not the time to buy 1 lb. That's the time to buy
Speaker A
eight. Butter freezes beautifully in its own wrapper, keeps 6 months to a year and you'll never pay full price again.
Speaker A
Same goes for nuts. By the way, nuts go rancid in the pantry because of the oil in them. In the freezer, they last a year or more. By the way, tricks like these, I've got a whole book of them.
Speaker A
Every method I use to run this house for less, all written down in one place.
Speaker A
It's on my website, the link's right below the video. Go grab it and I won't bring it up again. Number 15, the herb in oil trick. You buy a bunch of parsley for one recipe, use three tablespoons and the rest turns to slime in the
Speaker A
crisper drawer. Instead, chop the whole bunch, pack it into an ice cube tray, top each cube with olive oil, freeze.
Speaker A
Now you've got little flavor cubes you drop straight into a hot pan. Works for basil, cilantro, rosemary, all of it.
Speaker A
One tray replaces those little jars of herb paste they sell for $4. Number 14, freeze ginger and garlic whole. Fresh ginger dries out and gets stringy before you use half the knob. Throw it in the freezer whole. When you need it, grate
Speaker A
it frozen skin and all, honestly, and it grates finer than fresh. Garlic cloves freeze fine, too, peeled in a little bag. You'll stop buying that jarred minced garlic that tastes like nothing.
Speaker A
Number 13, the tomato paste dollop trick. Every recipe wants 1 Tbsp of tomato paste and the can holds six. So, you use one, put the can in the fridge, and find it fuzzy 3 weeks later.
Speaker A
Instead, dollop the rest in tablespoons onto a plate lined with wax paper. Freeze, then bag the frozen dollops. One can now lasts you six recipes instead of one. Same trick works for leftover buttermilk, leftover broth, even leftover wine, freeze it in cubes for
Speaker A
cooking. Nothing gets poured down the drain in this house. Number 12, flash freeze on a tray, then bag. This one changes everything, so listen. If you throw fresh berries straight into a bag and freeze them, you get one solid
Speaker A
brick. Instead, spread them in one layer on a cookie sheet, freeze for a couple hours, then pour them into a bag. Now, every berry is separate, and you can shake out exactly what you need. This works for berries, chopped peppers,
Speaker A
meatballs, cookie dough balls, anything. It's the whole difference between a freezer you use and a freezer full of bricks. Number 11, blanch your vegetables first. If you've ever frozen fresh green beans and thawed them into gray mush, this is why. Vegetables have
Speaker A
something in them that keeps working even in the cold. It slowly ruins the color and the texture. A quick dip in boiling water, 1 to 3 minutes, then straight into ice water, shuts it down.
Speaker A
Blanched vegetables come out of the freezer nearly as good as they went in. Unblanched ones come out sad. 2 minutes of work, that's the whole secret. All right, we're halfway. And before we get into the back half where for real money
Speaker A
is, let me clear up the two biggest freezer myths because they're costing you food. Myth one, freezer burn means the food went bad. It didn't. Freezer burn isn't about cold, it's about air.
Speaker A
Air touching the food dries out the surface and that's the white leathery patch you see. It's ugly and it tastes dry, but the food is safe. Cut the patch off and cook the rest. And the fix is simple, less air. Press the air out of
Speaker A
bags, wrap things tight, use containers that actually fit the food. Myth two, frozen food expires. Kept solidly frozen at 0°, food stays safe basically forever.
Speaker A
Forever. The quality slips over time, texture, flavor, but that chicken from 8 months ago is not going to hurt you. The dates on packages are about quality, not safety and they get treated like the food turns to poison at midnight. It
Speaker A
doesn't. Now, back to the list. Number 10, cook once, eat twice every time. If you're making chili, soup, spaghetti sauce, a casserole, it is almost no extra work to make double. Eat one, freeze one. Two months from now, on a
Speaker A
night when you're tired and takeout is calling, you pull dinner out of the freezer instead of spending $30. This is the single best defense against the delivery apps ever invented. One night of doubled cooking a week and you'll
Speaker A
have a freezer full of dinners by Christmas. Number nine, freeze cooked rice and beans. Dried beans cost a quarter of what canned beans cost, but nobody wants to soak and simmer beans on a Tuesday. So, don't.
Speaker A
Cook a big pot on Sunday, freeze them flat in bags in two-cup portions, that's about one can's worth. Cooked rice freezes even better. It actually reheats fluffier from frozen than from the fridge. You get the price of dried with
Speaker A
the convenience of canned. That's the whole game. Number eight, freeze bags flat then file them like books. Whatever you're freezing in a bag, soup, sauce, beans, brown ground beef, lay it flat on a cookie sheet until it's solid. Now it's a thin slab.
Speaker A
Thin slabs stack, and better yet, they stand upright like files in a drawer, so you can flip through your freezer like a recipe box. Flat things also thaw in a fraction of the time. A brick of chili takes all day to thaw. A slab thaws in
Speaker A
an hour. Number seven, label everything. Everything. I know, it sounds like nagging, but an unlabeled freezer bag in January is a mystery, and mysteries get thrown away. A piece o
Speaker A
seconds. And put the new stuff in the back. Old stuff up front, so you're always eating the oldest first. Most freezer waste isn't spoilage, it's forgetting. You can't eat what you can't identify. Number six, the scrap bag.
Speaker A
Keep one bag in the freezer for scraps. Onion ends, carrot peels, celery tops, the Parmesan rind, chicken bones off the dinner plates. When the bag's full, dump it in a pot with water, simmer an hour or two, strain that's broth. Free broth
Speaker A
from things you were paying to throw away. The box stuff runs three, four dollars a quart, and it's mostly salty water. Mine costs nothing and tastes like actual food. Number five, freeze flour and grains when they come home.
Speaker A
Here's one almost nobody knows. Those little pantry moths that show up in your flour and your rice, they usually come home from the store already in the package as eggs too small to see. Three or four days in the freezer kills them
Speaker A
before they ever hatch. I freeze every bag of flour, cornmeal, and oats for a few days before it goes in the pantry.
Speaker A
One infestation means throwing out the whole cupboard. This trick costs nothing, and it saved me from that twice. Number four, keep the freezer full even if it's full of water. An empty freezer is an expensive freezer.
Speaker A
Every time you open the door, the cold air spills out and the machine has to chill all that empty space back down.
Speaker A
Frozen food holds the cold for you. If yours is half empty, fill milk jugs with water and freeze them. Your electric bill goes down and here's the bonus. If the power goes out, a full freezer stays frozen about twice as long as a half
Speaker A
empty one. Those jugs are also free ice for the cooler all summer. They sell fancy ice packs for that. Don't bother.
Speaker A
Number three, ice cube trays are for everything except ice. Leftover coffee, freeze it and it chills iced coffee without watering it down. Lemon juice, when lemons are cheap. Pesto in the summer when basil's everywhere. Baby food, if you've got little ones
Speaker A
homemade, one cube per serving for a fraction of what the jars cost. Even leftover canned coconut milk or cream.
Speaker A
The tray costs a dollar. Buy three more. Number two, thaw it right and know the refreezing rule. Two things here, because this is where people either waste food or take risks. First, the safe way to thaw is in the fridge
Speaker A
overnight or in cold water if you're in a hurry. Never on the counter all day, because the outside gets warm long before the middle thaws. And warm meat sitting out is how you make your family sick. Second, if meat thawed in the
Speaker A
fridge and you changed your dinner plans, you can refreeze it. It's safe. The texture suffers a little, that's all. People throw out pounds of perfectly good meat because someone told them refreezing was dangerous. It isn't, not if it stayed cold. And number one,
Speaker A
buy the markdown meat, all of it. This is the trick the whole list has been building to. Every grocery store marks down meat that's near its sell-by date.
Speaker A
Sometimes 30, 40, 50% off. Ask the meat counter what time they do mark downs and start shopping then. That date is about the fridge, not the freezer. The second that meat freezes, the clock stops. So, when chicken thighs
Speaker A
are half price, I don't buy one pack. I buy six, portion them into meal-size bags, press the air out, label them, and freeze them flat. That one habit, buying meat on sale and freezing it in portions, saves me more than everything
Speaker A
else on this list combined. You stop paying whatever the price happens to be the day you're hungry, and start paying the lowest price the store offers all month. That's the whole trick. The freezer turns a sale into a stockpile.
Speaker A
Now, let me say the quiet part, because somebody profits from you not knowing all this. Every pound of food you throw away is a pound you buy again. The grocery store doesn't mind your bananas going brown. That's another bunch sold.
Speaker A
The frozen food companies charge you $4 for a bag of vegetables you could have frozen yourself for one. The delivery apps are counting on your freezer being empty at 6:00 on a Thursday. And those dates stamped on packages, the ones that
Speaker A
scare people into tossing perfectly safe food, mostly aren't about safety at all. They're about quality, set by the same companies that sell you the replacement.
Speaker A
Nobody's running a scheme in a back room. It's just that a family that wastes food shops more often, and everybody in that chain gets paid every time you do. A full, organized freezer takes you out of that chain. So, here's
Speaker A
your first step, and it's small. Tonight, take 15 minutes and go through your freezer. Pull everything out, toss the true mysteries, put tape and dates on everything else, oldest in front.
Speaker A
Then pick one trick from today, the scrap bag is the easiest. It starts with your very next onion, and start it this week. And tell me in the comments, what's the oldest thing you found in your freezer? And be honest. Also, if
Speaker A
you've got a freezer trick I missed, put it down there. I read every one, and half of what I I came from women like you. Next time, I'm showing you exactly what I do with one whole chicken to get
Speaker A
four meals out of it, and the freezer is a big part of that. You'll want to see it. See you then.
Topics:freezer hacksfood storage tipsreduce food wastesave money groceriesfreezing techniquesmeal prepfood preservationbudget cookingkitchen tipsTried & True
