This Easy Trick to Prevent Freezer Burn Takes Two Seconds
My freezer works hard. I would go so far as to say I am a freezer power user. Despite being a food professional who writes and thinks about food all day. I often find myself at a loss for what to cook, especially at the end of the day. I rely on the thoughtfulness of past me quite a lot. I like to cook things in big batches that I can easily heat up when I’m at a loss. In addition to the expected types of freezer-friendly dishes like chili and soup, I also love to bake extra loaves of no-knead bread, make extra cookie dough, and tons of pierogi, which are some of my most relied-upon staples.
Irregularly shaped, solid foods like the ones mentioned above aren’t really good candidates for airtight containers with stiff sides. They fit much more neatly into gallon-size freezer bags. There’s one step I always take — and you should too — when freezing things in zipper-top bags: Suck out the air with a straw.
Why Suck the Air out of Zipper-Top Freezer Bags?
One of the most useful little science-y facts I’ve learned from my years in various kitchens is that air is the enemy of freezing. Exposure to air can cause food to get freezer burned. Moisture trapped in the food itself evaporates into the air — even the small amount of air remaining when you’ve sealed a zipper-top bag.
The best way to prevent freezer burn is to limit the amount of air to which frozen food is exposed. That’s easy to do with something like soup that can completely fill whatever container it’s in, leaving no room for excess air. With something solid, though, you need to remove the air yourself before the food hits the freezer.
How to Remove Excess Air from Zipper-Top Bags
You have a few choices: You can shell out the money for a vacuum sealer, which will remove every last bit of air, you can try and press the air out with one hand while sealing the bag with the other (not super effective), or you can opt for my go-to method of using a straw to suck the air out yourself.
Add food to the bag and seal it 3/4 of the way. You can press as much air out at this stage as possible, but depending on what’s in the bag, that may be difficult.
Insert a straw into the open 1/4 of the bag. Slide the straw all the way to the far corner of the bag and seal the bag around it so the only open part of the seal is where the straw is placed.
Suck out all of the air. Breathing in through your mouth and out through your nose, use the straw to remove the excess air from the bag. When you’ve got as much out as you can (it will never be all of it, but the bag should be clinging to the food in the bag), quickly pull out the straw with one hand while sealing the bag fully with the other to prevent as much air as possible from making its way back in.
Tips for Freezing in Zipper-Top Bags
Invest in reusable straws. Rather than wasting a disposable straw every time you need to freeze something, buy some reusable straws that you can wash and use over and over again.
Freeze small foods flat first. If you don’t want your cookie dough mounds, dumplings, or green beans to merge into one unusable mass, freeze them laid in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet before transferring to a zipper-top bag.
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