Putting Food By - Janet Greene [123]
In the back of your mind will be the feeling that you will end up using double the original cooking time, but there’s no need to be rigid about it. Use the appearance around the edges of the dish, and the color of a topping or a crust—AND a reliable thermometer.
And then there are the foods to be heated loose—dumped from their containers into an ovenproof serving dish (and heated in a medium oven, with minimum stirring; and perhaps a crumb topping added in the last few minutes). Or heated over simmering water in a double boiler. No problems here: you can tell when they’re ready to serve.
Length of Freezer Storage for Top Quality
The maximum storage times for convenience foods given by experts is 6 months for cookie dough (more, if they’re baked) down to 2 weeks for gelatin salads (which break down over longer hauls). These and the times for more robust dishes mean the length of time that the food is still at its peak and retains best texture, flavor, etc.; it does not mean that, if stored longer than for the stated recommendation, the foods have become spoiled or dangerous to eat.
Dairy products’ best storage ranges from up to 6 months for butter, down to 3 months for cream, 2 months for ice cream, and about 1 month for whipped cream. These spans are approximate, but they’re a good yardstick.
Pastries have a longer freezer life than the creams. Hearty soups and stews are good for from 2 to 4 months; their relatively short life comes from the fact that they often contain seasonings that do not stand up well for long freezing (see These Don’t Freeze Well, earlier).
Roasted meats are usually frozen cut off the bone, or in serving-size slices, etc. It is important to remove fatty skin and fatty tissue to prolong freezer life (fat impairs freezing). Small game birds, rabbit, or poultry may be precooked as the start of becoming a fricassee or being served in a chafing dish with a special brown sauce; if their cooking is arrested so it can be finished later, the storage time is less than for fully cooked meat dishes, which can hold well up to 4 months.
Large pieces of meat may be packed in a large container, but it is best to separate the pieces by double folds of freezer film, or to wrap each piece in foil or film before adding it to the pack. Such dividers allow you to remove easily only part of what’s in a large container, or to spread all the contents out for quicker thawing or reheating.
All small pieces of meat, or sliced meats, keep much better if they are covered with a gravy or a cream sauce to help keep out the air. These sauces are the most difficult aspect of preparing homemade convenience main dishes, and they are worth a separate main section all their own, which follows.
FREEZING PARTS OF A MEAL
Soups
Concentrate soups by boiling them down to save space. From some broths/stocks canned in Chapter 10, take other soups to freeze, except for onion soup. The flavors in French Onion Soup will suffer from freezing.
The base for New England Fish Chowder also freezes well, although it does not store long as stocks or clear soups do. Thaw it in the refrigerator, then stir in hot milk before putting it over heat in a heavy pot.
Baked Goods
USING FILO PASTRY SHEETS
Filo (also phyllo, which is closer to the Greek) pastry sheets, bought sealed in boxes, freeze well. Filo comes in two thicknesses and the sheets are so parchment-thin that they’re translucent. They can be used as pastry for meat-and-rice pies, for the famous spinach pie, as “thousand-layer” cases for tiny dessert tarts, for canapes, or for main-dish piroshkis.
Basically, each sheet is laid out on a board or in a pan, then dribbled/ painted with melted butter and oil, and another sheet is placed on it, treated the same way. By using half the sheets as a bottom crust, as it were, and putting a filling in the middle, and topping the whole thing with more buttered layers of filo, you have achieved a dish that freezes well, heats splendidly, and always brings pleasure.
The trouble in working