Putting Food By - Janet Greene [122]
Thaw in the refrigerator.
Freezing Cheese
Cheeses that freeze well are Camembert, Port du Salut, Mozzarella, Lieder-krantz and their cousins, and Parmesan.
Cheeses with a high fat content (such as Cheddar, Swiss, and American brick, etc.), are best kept at refrigerator temperatures (32 to 40 F/Zero to 4 C). If you have more than you can use soon, though, cut it in ½-pound (or less) pieces, wrap each piece tightly, label, and freeze.
Plain cream cheese (fatty) mixed with cream for dips, etc., will freeze satisfactorily.
If the curds of cottage cheese are not washed, it keeps quite well. This means you can freeze homemade cottage cheese, but not the commercial kind. But it, too, may be combined with other ingredients in a gelatin salad for freezing.
Freezing Ice Cream
Either purchased or homemade ice cream keeps its quality up to 2 months in the freezer—although your own recipe will be best if served within a week or two. Neither will keep well unless it is carefully sealed after every time it is opened.
Store homemade ice cream in good plastic freezer tubs with tight covers; allow 1½ inches of headroom for each 1 pint because of its expansion. For best storage, seal a carton/tub commercial ice cream in a freezer bag.
Press a layer of plastic freezer film down on the ice cream in a partially used container to prevent crystals from forming; cover securely.
FREEZING MAIN DISHES
Some authorities will tell us to leave main dishes not-quite-done with the idea that they’ll finish cooking while they reheat. This is too tricky for our purposes. The simplest advice PFB has to offer is to have all dishes fully cooked. Just be careful in reheating.
Roundup of Points That Make a Difference
The TV dinner is temptation to many home cooks. We all start out wanting to create complete frozen meals like the ones in the supermarket, only better. However, the bought ones usually have at least one part that is under-cooked deliberately, while its sidebars can stand long reheating. The makers have established why to leave some parts sealed, others partly covered, and one wholly uncovered during the platter’s time in the oven. And we haven’t.
So cook and package your own favorite things in separate reheating containers or decant them into a saucepan over low heat; deal with each part of your meal on its own merits when you’re putting it together—and stand back for the compliments.
Re-Cooking Times
These can be tricky. Probably the best solution to the problem is to start by cooking fully any dish you plan to freeze and reheat, leaving off any cheese-crumb topping until it goes into the oven for the last time; then thaw the food, and rely on oven time only for decent reheating.
Later, with experience (and jotting notes on your recipe card) you can figure on the time required for cooking the dish as it comes frozen from the freezer. Of course, your microwaving instructions will have you defrosting and heating with no trouble. However, there are no rules of thumb for either microwave or conventional reheating in a regular oven.
Temperature. Use the oven-setting at which the dish was originally cooked; or, if it’s a pot pie whose filling is precooked, use the oven-setting required to cook the top crust perfectly.
Time. Start with less than double the original cooking time: if it took 30 minutes to bake your pasta-plus-sauce-plus-cheese dish for serving, think first of baking it frozen for 50 minutes. Then check: it should be bubbling around the edges, and the center must be hot—and neither of these is happening. Check in another 15 minutes: nearly ready; add a few minutes more. And use your pencil or instant-read thermometer (the good one you got when you were canning in cans, or were exhausting seafood in jars); or use your roasting thermometer, by golly, which is accurate enough for this use. They’ll tell you if the center is