The Freezer Didn’t Do It

8 Freezer Mistakes That Should Never Have Happened

A kitchen assistant of mine was once given fifteen kilos of pumpkin to cut, roast and purée. Ten or twelve of them, and if you have ever taken the skin off a pumpkin you will know it is a beast of a job unless your knife is genuinely sharp. A fair few of the assistants were nervous of a sharp knife, which is its own problem for another day.

It was Friday afternoon. His colleagues were having a moan because he was nowhere near helping with the Friday clean, and he was taking far too long over his pumpkins.

On Monday morning we found four of them in the freezer. Whole. Skin on.

Nobody had made a mistake. He knew perfectly well that you cannot do anything with a frozen whole pumpkin. What he knew better was that the freezer door was two steps away and he was woefully behind schedule, and that on Monday it would be somebody else’s problem — possibly his, but that was Monday’s business.

That is what a freezer had become in that kitchen. Not storage. Postponement.

Every one of the freezer mistakes below involves food that was frozen correctly, in the sense that it went in and got cold. None of it came out worth eating. And in almost every case the freezer was standing in for a decision somebody did not want to make.

1.  Frozen instead of Binned

In a professional kitchen, throwing food away means filling in a wastage report, or allocating it to staff feeding. Either way it goes on a form, the form gets seen, and somebody asks about it. So staff would freeze things — anything — so they could say they were saving money rather than wasting it. Or they took it home and ate it, and said nothing at all.

I have seen macaroni cheese frozen this way. It thaws into a grainy, split mess and goes straight in the bin, which is where it was always going. Cottage cheese and cream cheese, both of which separate. And salad, which is the purest example of the lot, because leaves do not survive freezing and nobody has ever thought they do.

At home there is no form, but there is the same small discomfort. Binning food feels like an admission — that you cooked too much, that nobody liked it, that you bought it and never used it. Freezing it feels like thrift. It is not thrift. It is the same waste with a three-month delay and a container tied up in the meantime.

The question worth asking: if this were thawed and sitting in front of me right now, would I eat it? If the answer is no, it is not a freezer job.

2.  Frozen instead of finishing the job

The pumpkins. Whole tomatoes shoved in a bag rather than blanched and skinned for sauce.

Prep is the work, and freezing something half-done does not postpone the work — it removes the option of ever doing it properly. A whole pumpkin thaws to mush and there is nothing to be done with it at all. Tomatoes are kinder and will cook down after the fact, but they carry all that water with them and the sauce is thin and watery for it.

Roast and purée the pumpkin and you have soup, muffins, cake, the base for a dozen things. Freeze it whole and it is going in the bin regardless — all you have done is put off the moment.

3.  Frozen instead of a walk outside

We paid for a compost bin from the recycling company, which sat outside and was emptied fortnightly and cleaned monthly. In July that bin was not somewhere anyone wanted to go near.

One of the girls put fish skins and trimmings into the freezer rather than making the walk. When it came to light she blamed somebody else.

That would have been irritating enough on its own. What made it serious was the label. The trimmings had gone in marked *white fish, 1.8kg* — so that is what went onto the freezer list, and that is what we believed we were holding.

We found out we were not on the day we needed it. That 1.8 kilos was forty-five portions of cooked fish for a fish pie, going to a school.

A bag of skins in a freezer is a nuisance. A bag of skins wearing the label of the thing you are counting on is something else entirely, because it does not read as an absence. It reads as stock. You do not go looking for what you already think you have.

4.  Frozen without a label

Years ago, when we first started the business, we rented a kitchen from a chap who ran an evening delivery service — we used the kitchen in the mornings. Before we moved in we did a full deep clean, because the place was minging. I still do not know how it had been passing its inspections.

Going through his freezer, I found pieces of steak with no label on them at all. The original shop packaging was still underneath, and the date on it had expired four years earlier.

I told him we could not be inspected with that in the building, and he dug in. It had been frozen the whole time so it was perfectly fine, and anyway he had bought it on sale and was not about to throw that money in a bin — an argument he made at some length, and then made again.

In the end he said he would take it home. I am not at all sure he did. It was gone the next time I looked, and that is as much as I know.

Four years, buried at the bottom of a chest freezer as though it belonged there. Without a label there was nothing to say how long it had been sitting and nothing to prompt anyone to ask. Though in his case a label would have changed nothing. He was too cheap to throw it out either way.

5.  The list is accurate to the labels, and the labels are wrong

We ran two enormous double-door freezers, and every fortnight it was one man’s job to reconcile them: gloves on, everything out, everything checked against the list.

Invariably whole sections of the list would be wrong — things used and never crossed off, things put in and never written down. When I called him on it he would always say that so-and-so had been helping him and must not have called those items off.

An inaccurate list is worse than no list, because you trust it. You plan a week around the kilo of mince you were certain was in there and which was eaten a fortnight ago — or, as above, around forty-five portions of fish that were never fish at all.

At home this does not require a reconciliation with gloves. It requires writing it down as it goes in and crossing it off as it comes out — thirty seconds, at the moment you are already standing at the freezer.

6.  The packaging did not survive

Staff get lazy at the end of a shift, and a lazy wrap is half a sheet of cling film. It comes loose in a week and the food sits there naked against the frost.

We used to buy margarine in two-kilo plastic tubs, and rather than send hundreds of them to landfill we washed and reused them for everything — storage, weighing up, and the lids as plates when we grabbed something at four o’clock. Stack those ten deep, three stacks of them, and the lids crack. Then you have debris in the food, and the whole lot becomes useless.

Freezing does not damage food nearly as fast as bad packaging does.

7.  Somebody overfilled the container

Food expands as it freezes. Force the lid onto a tub filled to the brim and the pressure pushes it off from the inside — sometimes within hours, always overnight.

You will not see it happen. You will just find, weeks later, a lidless container of something with a crust of frost across the top of it.

And here is the part that turns a waste problem into something worse. Nobody who finds it wants to be the one who binned it. So the lid goes back on, the tub goes back on the shelf, and in due course it goes into service — frost, split lid, whatever came off the lid and went in with it, and all. That is no longer somebody being lazy. That is potentially somebody serving it to you.

Leave a gap. Not much: a centimetre or two at the top of the container.

8.  Nothing new ever goes to the back — or the bottom

New in front and old behind, or in a chest freezer new on top and old underneath. Either way the oldest food ends up the least visible, and what you cannot see you do not use.

That is not a freezer problem, it is a rotation problem, and it is the whole of what FIFO exists to prevent: first in, first out. New items to the back or the bottom, older items forward or up. It takes ten seconds when you are already putting something away, and it is the difference between a freezer that feeds you and a freezer that is merely full.

And one you cannot do anything about

One very hot summer one of our freezers packed up over a weekend. Nobody knew until Monday morning, and by then everything in it had to go — thousands of pounds of stock into the bin.

At home the number is smaller but the mechanism is identical, and this is the one on the list you cannot organise your way out of. A freezer can pack up on the Saturday and be running again by the Sunday, and a thermometer read on Monday will show minus eighteen and tell you nothing whatsoever about the weekend. Ours was at least obliging enough to stay off until somebody found it.

None of this is about freezers

Reading all that back, you would be forgiven for thinking I ran a shambolic kitchen. I did not.

Every one of those freezer mistakes happened for the same reason, and it was never ignorance. Somebody took a shortcut. The pumpkins, the fish skins, the cling film, the overfilled tubs, the list nobody finished reconciling — in each case the person knew perfectly well what the job was and chose not to do it properly at the time.

Things go wrong in every kitchen there has ever been, professional or domestic, because kitchens are run by people who are tired, in a hurry, and at four o’clock on a Friday would rather be somewhere else. Nobody is above it. The corner gets cut, and it is always cut for what seems like a good idea at the time — it saves ten minutes, it avoids an unpleasant job, it feels like thrift, it postpones an admission. There is never a good reason. There is only ever an excuse.

And the corner never saved a thing. The four pumpkins were still sitting there on Monday morning and by then were not edible at all — a job dodged on the Friday, three kilos of pumpkin in the bin, and nothing left that could be done with them. The fish skins went in the bin two months later than they should have and took forty-five portions of fish pie with them. The steak had been saved so carefully it cost four years of freezer space and was, in the end, worth nothing at all.

Cutting corners saves neither time nor money. All it decides is who gets to deal with it, and when.

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Currently I am not working in a commercial kitchen. But when we moved into our brand new kitchen in our renovated house, I wrote and implemented a system that seemed entirely natural after spending so many years in and around commercial kitchens.  And, it started with a question…