Sunday batch routine is going well, the husband has stopped making comments, all good. But I've been cutting a corner and I want to know if it's a bad one.
When I'm freezing a batch rather than eating it that week, I've been taking the bags out of the bath, letting them sit on the side for a bit while I tidy, then straight into the freezer. No ice bath, because the ice bath takes ages and all my ice goes on the fridge batch.
Two problems. One, the bags have frozen into odd lumpy shapes that won't stack. Two, my sister in law (food hygiene certificate, mentions it often) says hot food in the freezer is dangerous and I'm warming up everything else in there. Is she right or is the freezer cold enough not to matter?
Still looking at 40% unlabelled mystery bags in my own freezer, so I'm not one to lecture. But I did do this, and the bags that went in hot were always the ones with ice crystals all through them when they came out. Chilling first fixed that.
The "bit on the side while I tidy" is the part I'd worry about more than the freezer. A big bag of hot chicken thighs doesn't cool much in twenty minutes on a counter, and the freezer is not a fast chiller, it's a slow one with a door. Ice bath first, every bag, then lay them flat on a tray in the freezer. They freeze into neat slabs that stack like books.
If ice is the problem, freeze a couple of big tubs of water during the week and use those. Two frozen tubs and cold tap water in a cool box does a whole batch.
#5September 25, 2026, 10:05 am Tessa, your sister in law is right, though maybe not for the reason she thinks. The freezer itself will cope, but a hot bag cools slowly in there, and the time it spends going through the danger zone of 40 to 140°F (4 to 60°C) is the bit that matters. A thick bag of hot food in still, cold air can take hours to get through that range, and the outside freezes long before the middle is cold. An ice bath gets the same bag through it in a fraction of the time, because water pulls heat out far faster than air.
So the routine is the same whether the bag is going to the fridge or the freezer: straight from the bath into at least half ice and half water, until it's cold right through, then into the fridge or onto a flat tray in the freezer. Cooked food should be refrigerated within 2 hours, and the faster the better. Mike's frozen tubs are a great idea, and it's what I do on big batch days. Flat freezing also helps with the reheat later, because a thin, even slab reheats evenly, and from frozen you just add roughly half again to the time.
The full cook, chill, freeze, reheat routine is in the meal prep guide, and the reheat step is in reheating with sous vide. And please, everyone, label the bags.
Two weeks into the new routine. Froze four tubs of water midweek, cool box ice bath on Sunday, bags flat on baking trays in the freezer. Everything stacks now and I've reclaimed a whole drawer. The sister in law has been informed she was right and is being insufferable about it, which is a price I'll pay.
