Hi, Melissa Clark here.
I'm gonna tell you everything you need to know
about getting your meat or your protein freezer ready.
You can freeze meat, whether it's raw or cooked
but raw meat is gonna freeze a little better,
and it's gonna last longer about three to six months.
First thing you need to do is
when you get your meat home from the supermarket
take it out of the supermarket wrapper,
because this wrapper is probably not air tight
and then just rewrap it,
you can put it in a little freezer bag,
or if you've got a vacuum sealer,
that is perfect, just vacuum seal it up.
The best way to thaw frozen meat is overnight in the fridge,
and it's gonna thaw faster
if you put it in smaller packages.
So just wrap your chicken breasts or your hamburger patties
or your steaks individually
and then they'll thaw pretty evenly.
And here's a trick, I love this trick.
If you want to marinate the meat while it is thawing,
go right ahead, just open up your bag
and take whatever you wanna marinate it with,
lemon, herbs, garlic, a little salt maybe,
throw it right in there let it sit in the fridge overnight
and then when you make the food the next day,
it's going to taste amazing.
You know what I do?
I have these little sheet pans, like these little mini ones
and I'll put this when it's liquidy on it
stick it in the freezer
and then when it gets hard, I can take the pan out,
and then I have even more room.
Did you know that you can freeze dairy products?
No I didn't know actually, I had never thought-
And one of the things I'm going...
I freeze my grated parm all the time,
not my good parm, not the good stuff
but the grated stuff that I'm gonna use in cooking.
And I'm gonna add some bit of this parm
that has been in the freezer right on top.
I feel like this is the thing that people don't know.
They know they can freeze meat,
they know they can freeze vegetables
but you can freeze milk.
You can freeze certain cheeses.
You can actually freeze yogurt and cream cheese
especially if you're gonna use them for cooking.
And heavy cream also,
heavy cream freezes really well
because of high fat content allows it to stay together.
I would guess that for obvious reasons,
because of fat content.
Exactly, the only thing that gets a little funky
with freezing things like milk
is that sometimes it's separates, but I have a trick,
okay so say that you've got some extra milk
and you bought it on sale you put it in your freezer
and you have defrosted it
and you noticed it looks kinda curdly
even though it's not off, it's just separated.
So what you do is you just put it in your blender
and you're gonna re-emulsify it
I'm just gonna turn this on for like...
It's a really powerful blender
it might take you 10 seconds it's gonna take me two seconds
and it's gonna be smooth and re-emulsifyied.
Cool.
And that is it.
And then you can just go ahead and use that.
Use it in your tea.
Worst comes to worst, say that you try it
and it's still kind of looks, you're not sure
use it for baking.
Oh great.
One thing you cannot absolutely cannot freeze
in terms of cheese, hard cheeses do not freeze well.
Exactly.
While I was thinking about the segment
I was thinking,
"What about Triple Crown?
"What about like Brie, can you freeze Brie?"
And I realized I'd never done it.
And I didn't know the answer.
So Rachael, you and I are gonna experiment together.
I have frozen this little Brie, cute little Brie
and I froze it and it's defrosted
and I've let it come to room temperature
and I'm gonna taste it and we're gonna see what-
I'm guessing yes, again fat content.
Oh, you were exactly right look at that.
Gluey.
Look how beautiful that is.
Gorgeous.
It is smooth, it is gluey.
Oh, really good.
Look at how excited Melissa is
about experimenting with freezing of cheese.
She's just-
(Melissa laughs)
Okay one more thing that you may not know
you can freeze eggs, you can freeze eggs.
You probably know you can freeze egg whites
'cause people talk about that
but you can freeze whole eggs, not in a shell.
If you freeze eggs in the shell,
it's just going to burst.
So not in the shell but what you can do
if you want to freeze whole eggs.
So I just have a little container here.
You just crack your egg and you put it in your container.
'Cause again, same thing what if you got to nice eggs
and you got too many of them and you can just freeze it
and then you know that it's in there.
That's so great.
What I also like to do is...
This is a good trick.
Take an ice cube tray
and you can do this for separating eggs
and you put the white in one space
and the yolk in the other.
And the yolk in the other.
Exactly, so the white fits in there perfectly
and then the yolk,
and then the other trick to the yolk
just add a little pinch of salt to the yolk
and stir that up and that way you know that
when you defrost it it's gonna be smooth.
If you just freeze it without doing the salt trick,
it kind of gets jelled
so the salt keeps things nice and liquid.
And then when you frozen them all
you can pop them out of the ice cube tray,
put them in a heavy-duty plastic freezer bag,
throw them back in and then whenever you need an egg,
they're there for you.