Have you ever frozen a whole lemon, then grated it to make zest, pulp and juice to use in your favorite recipes? When you grate the frozen lemon the seeds fall out of the grater, so you can use the entire lemon with little waste. That’s one of my favorite freezer hacks and here’s 7 more freezer hacks to help you with your cooking:
Freeze a stick of butter and grate it. Grating frozen butter makes it easier to incorporate butter into batters and melts quickly.
Freeze peeled garlic cloves and grate them. Keep small freezer bags or containers of grated garlic in your freezer to use in your recipes.
Freeze peeled ginger and grate it. Peel ginger with the back of a spoon instead of a knife. The edge of a spoon peels off just the peeling and won’t cut into the ginger as much as a knife will cut into it.
Frozen chocolate bars grate easily to make chocolate shavings.
What to do with leftover bread? Put it in your blender and pulse the bread to make fine breadcrumbs. Place the breadcrumbs in a freezer bag, seal and date.
Freeze fresh basil leaves in olive oil in ice cube trays. Place fresh basil leaves in a blender to purée the basil while you slowly drizzle in olive oil. You add just enough olive oil to get the basil to blend up into a pour-able consistency. Then you pour the liquid into an ice cube tray, freeze it for a few hours, and then pop the cubes into a freezer bag and date the bag. Add frozen basil cubes to pasta and pasta sauces at the end of cooking to infuse basil flavor into the dish.
Boiled eggs always seem to take forever to cool after cooking and I am always anxious to make deviled eggs because I can’t wait to eat them. When my eggs are cooked, I drain the water from the pot. Then I fill the pot with ice cubes from my freezer. After a couple of minutes, I move the eggs around in the pot and add more ice cubes if needed. When the eggs are cool to the touch they are ready to peel. The eggs cool much more quickly by using this method.
