Putting Food By - Janet Greene [120]
Artificial table salt—substituting for a sodium compound—should wait to be added until the food is being served.
Table salt (sodium chloride) fades, and has the added drawback of inhibiting good freezing if used in pronounced quantities (ham, bacon, etc., don’t hold long in the freezer, although part of this failure is their fat content).
Fried, especially deep-fried, foods taste stale: not rancid, just tired. These suffer texture changes:
Hard-cooked egg whites get rubbery and tough. (So don’t freeze dishes garnished with chopped egg or egg slices; or chopped-egg sandwich fillings; or stuffed eggs.)
Cooked soft meringue toppings get tough and shrink.
Mayonnaise separates and boiled dressings separate when frozen alone. Cream sauces or egg-thickened sauces, or wheat-flour-thickened gravies separate—but there’s a whole section on special ingredients for frozen sauces under Thickeners in Chapter 5.
Lettuce, tomatoes, celery, cucumbers, and similar salad vegetables get limp and watery. (But they hold in gelatin salad, also coming.)
Raw apples and grapes get mushy. Raw apples, bananas, avocados, peaches, and pears get dark without an anti-oxidant treatment (see Chapter 14, “Freezing Fruits,” and Chapter 5, “Common Ingredients”).
Old potatoes get grainy and soft in a frozen stew; new ones freeze better. But why not add potatoes when you’re reheating the stew?
Green peas are better frozen separately and added to a combination during reheating.
Cooked pasta loses texture, but cooked rice does not: try substituting the rice from time to time.
Cheese-and-crumb toppings get soggy and dull: add when you’re preheating the food for serving.
Custards—stirred (also called “boiled” though it’s not), baked or used as fillings—separate or weep.
Fluffy meringue cake frostings get tacky (butter-and-sugar ones freeze well, however).
FREEZING EGGS
There’s a giant IF with using frozen eggs, and it has several parts.
Frozen eggs should be used only in long-cooked or long-baked foods. The reason is simple. Uncooked eggs are possibly the favorite growing medium of Salmonellae, which cause severe but usually short-term gastrointestinal illness in the person who eats them. And freezing does not destroy bacteria, it merely slows their growth to a halt. So if they are present, they will multiply if the eggs are thawed at room temperature or warmer; and they will not be destroyed by heat low and brief enough merely to set eggs delicately.
Do not, therefore, use defrosted eggs in mayonnaise, Hollandaise sauce and its cousins, or in any uncooked dessert such as chocolate mousse or a gelatin whip. And be sure that thawed eggs reach a temperature of 165 F/ 74 C if used in lightly cooked dishes such as stirred, or so-called “boiled” custard that of course is not really boiled, quick-scrambled eggs, or omelets.
The best uses for thawed eggs are cakes or breads or long-cooked desserts like Indian pudding or baked bread or rice pudding.
How Much in a Batch?
As you prepare to freeze your eggs, examine each one before adding it to the others in the freezer container. For eggs to be frozen whole—i.e., yolks and white combined gently by stirring—break each egg into a saucer, and look for desirable firm whites and plump, high-standing yolks. For freezing separated eggs, put each white and each yolk in its own saucer before adding either to the batch being frozen.
Whole eggs and egg yolks to be frozen must be stirred gently in the freezing container after they are counted and added. For whole eggs, stir until whites and yolks are combined. Stir yolks until mixed—with this added treatment to help prevent them from coagulating during storage: gently stir ½ teaspoon salt OR 1 teaspoon granulated sugar, or other natural sweetener, into 6 yolks. And note the sugar/salt on the label, so you’ll know if it’s for a dessert dish or not.
If you are dealing with many egg yolks at once, and want to prepare them in bulk even though they will be packaged in small amounts, stir in