What are you favorite preps/hacks/tricks/recipes involving a freezer?

Edit: Note: I just noticed what lemmy community this. Disregard it.

If you have a failed mechanical hard drive for a computer, putting the hard drive in freezer overnight can buy you about 10 minute of functional operation before the drive heats up and fails again. You usually only get one shot at this, but if you know where your critical data is, 10 minutes can usually get the data saved off.

Freeze vegetable scraps like celery trimmings, onion and carrot skins, or things that are going a bit off.

When you have enough…. Stock.

Also keep the carcass from breaking down whole chickens. (Chicken stock.)

You can get jumbo ice cube molds and freeze it in half-cup blocks.

When you make jelly, put it in the fridge until it is wobbly solid. Then move the jelly into the freezer for 15 minutes. The jelly will turn half slushy/shaved ice.

Homemade pesto spooned into a plastic film-lined ice cube tray. Once frozen, pop out the cubes, wrap each tightly and store in a freezer bag or -- better still -- vacuum seal them.

I don't have a mechanical vacuum sealer; I usually zip-bag them and suck out as much air as possible with a straw.

Even not vacuumed, they seem to last forever as long as they're not allowed to dry out. The high olive oil content may account for that.

Each cube does me enough for two pasta servings.

I bulk prepare and freeze a lot of dishes where making N portions takes way less than N times the effort. Such as bolognese sauce, chickpeas, beans, kibbeh, meatballs, spring rolls, etc.

FuglyDuck mentioned stock; note that you can freeze the finished stock in ice cubes too. It's a really practical way to add a bit of flavour to rice, some sauce, etc.

My cats are picky eaters, they like wet food but not straight from the can, they want it blended half-and-half with water. However a full can is too much for them, so guess what - ice cubes, here I go. Just be careful to not thaw it thinking that it's tomato paste (I did this once).

Empty ice cream pots, specially those 2L ones, are a great way to store those cubes.

If you need to grate softer cheeses (mozzarella/colby jack/etc.), popping them into the freezer for 15-30 minutes will firm them up so they shred more cleanly.

I freeze soups, curries, and sauces in those plastic deli containers. If you're freezing something that goes with rice, freeze a container with a portion of rice too.

Then just take the frozen container(s) and put it in your lunchbox- voila, ice pack plus food.

You can freeze nuts to make them last longer. Also bread. Also hot peppers like serranos. If you have lemons that are going to go bad before you use them, juice them and freeze the juice.

Some leaves and spices that you get in large quantities, like curry leaves or kaffir lime leaves or lemongrass you can freeze the extras in bags until you need them again.

The freezer lets you ✨freeze time✨

You can freeze bread. Put it in the toaster when you need it.

You can chop up and freeze most veg, this is a great alternative to letting it go bad because you didn't get around to using it. Bell peppers, for example, freeze well.

You can freeze tofu.

You can cook entire meals and freeze them.

I've frozen tortilla chips and they stay surprisingly crisp for months.

I can never use up cilantro quickly enough before it wilts, but it can be chopped and frozen in an ice cube tray with some water. When solid, pop them out and bag them in a Ziploc. I've also done this with chopped lemongrass.

Pesto sauce also freezes well.

I've been greatly over-making pizza dough. I stop at two punch-downs, separate it into golfball-sized lumps, throw them into deli containers separated with parchment squares, and freeze them. When I need some pepperoni rolls, I take out a couple and throw them in another deli container in the fridge the night before. They work exactly as fresh for a few weeks, after a month or so, you need to let them rise a bit more after thawing.

Next step will be to pre-make and freeze the rolls.

Thought of another.

If you need to cool something off quickly-sodas in a cooler for example, instead of just ice, add water.

The water increases contact and allows the what-ever to cool by conduction rather than radiation.

This also applies to cooling things like boiled eggs or custards or if you’re doing ice cream the “old way”, getting it started faster.

Also if you find you need crystal-clear ice, say for cocktails, you can make your own mold using a thermal or insulated cup and casting silicon resin. Get whatever you want to use as a positive for the mold, if you want spheres, a racquet ball or squash ball works well. Then, attach a straw with some glue- hot glue works, Elmer’s or CA. Doesn’t really matter.

You will need a second positive that goes into the bottom of the mold and has another straw between the object you want, as long as it creates a large space with a small void between them (a half an inch on straw length,) you can make this with crumpled up paper or something. It doesn’t need to be pretty. Just about as large as the positive you want.

Set that positive up in the mug exactly how you want the ice to form- something to keep the mold and straw centered helps. String held in place by the lid works.

You will also want to know about where the positive is widest. If you’re molding something cubed or with flat faces, have the straw come off a corner and that straw being the lowest point.

When the silicone is cured, use a knife to cut through at the widest. If you need to worry about alignment, you can cut in a wide shallow V. This cut lets you unmold.

It’s not necessary but helpful to leave some gap at the top to fill with, the water will find its way in,

The way that this works is simple. The insulation on the cup causes it to freeze from the top down. The clouding stuff in ice is caused by impurities coming out of solution. As it freezes top-down, the impurities are pushed out of the top chamber and into the bottom still-liquid chamber.

Leave the lid off for freezing. Then to finish, all you really need to do is cut the bits of drain and fill holes, temper the ice, which makes it nice and shiny (and, huh, wet…)

Whiskey snobs will be impressed. You can get best results with distilled water (the bottled jugs at the grocery store are cheap,) but some air will still be trapped and cause problems.

i started freezing tomato sauce and tomato paste (they go bad quite fast?!), in their original glass container, but was really annoyed by having to get it out of the freezer hours before you need it. Otherwise you won't get it out of the glass, or you have to warm it up...

Now i'm putting the sauce and paste into a ice cube tray, works quite good so far.