The Tiny Step You're Probably Forgetting Before Storing Food In The Freezer

Freezing food is an incredible way to help reduce food waste as well as keep your kitchen well-stocked for the future with less worry about food spoilage. While there isn't much that can truly last forever as frozen, there are a plethora of foods that hold up well in the freezer, like raw meat and seafood. But no matter what type of food you're freezing, and no matter how long you intend to freeze it for, you need to be labeling your food before it goes into the freezer.

The best time to label your food is before freezing it. There are many reasons why you should be labeling your food before it goes in the freezer — first, for food safety and organizational purposes, as it's easy to forget exactly what that mystery bag with a bit of freezer burn contains and how long it's been in your freezer. Although you may plan to label foods after they've been tossed in the freezer in haste, chances are you'll forget to go back and label them. Second, because food doesn't last forever in the freezer, and keeping your bags labeled will help you to reduce food waste.

Writing directly only a freezer bag is substantially easier before it becomes coated in moisture from the freezer, which is why it's key to do this before storage. The easiest way to do this is to lay the bag flat before you add food to it, and use a permanent marker to write exactly what is in the bag and the day's date. This way, you can avoid writing sloppily on an uneven surface that's covering the food. You can also write on painter's tape and adhere it to the bag or whatever vessel you're freezing the food in.

Labeling is especially important to remember when freezing large quantities of meat, as we recommend that you open the package and portion out the meat into smaller quantities, such as serving sizes. Doing this not only aids in ease of use as you can pull out smaller portions individually, but labeling them all helps you remember which need to be used up first based on the freezing date. The same is true if you like to make larger batches of foods that you don't need all of immediately, such as cookie dough, burger patties, or homemade stock.

Labeling food is important not only for organizational purposes, but for food safety as well. You're unlikely to remember exactly what day you added those raw chicken thighs in the freezer, but by labeling it with the date, you'll be sure to know if it's within the nine-month range of being safe to eat. Labeling isn't only essential for foods you're going to freeze, but it's absolutely crucial for homemade canned foods.

Proper labeling and food storage are some of the first and most important things I learned in culinary school, and this was further bolstered in my experience working in restaurant kitchens. Cooks would be severely reprimanded if food wasn't labeled properly and dated appropriately or if the handwriting wasn't clearly legible on the stereotypical blue painter's tape. This knowledge carries on in my daily life and makes cooking a breeze when I reach into the freezer and know exactly what I'm grabbing.