Did you know that, despite what you might believe or have been told in the past, fresh is not always best when it comes to your food? It’s definitely not the most convenient, and fresh food can lead to a lot more food waste than frozen food.
The truth is that your freezer – and the freezers at the supermarket or other food stores – might be your saviour when it comes to making healthy dishes and saving money. It’s time to bust some myths about frozen food, so read on to find out more.
Myth: Fresh Food Is Healthier Than Frozen Food
You might have the opinion that frozen food is unhealthy in some way. Maybe you think that frozen food has a lot of preservatives in it, or that it’s lost most of its goodness before the freezing process can take place. Although some frozen food will indeed be unhealthy, the same is true for some fresh food. And just as some fresh food can be extremely good for you, so too can frozen food be.
In fact, in some cases, frozen food is even more nutritious than fresh. This is because fresh food will be harvested before it is ripe, and the ripening process will be finished on the journey to the store, or the store itself. This may not sound too bad, but when you think that the average time between harvest and ending up on the shelves is a week and that during that week a lot of nutrients will be lost, you’ll see the issue.
Frozen food is frozen as soon as it is harvested (or within hours at the very longest), meaning that it retains many more nutrients than fresh food that was harvested at the same time.
Myth: Frozen Food Expires
Many people think that frozen food is only good for a short amount of time, depending on what it is. It might be a month, three months, maybe as much as a year, but beyond that, it needs to be thrown out.
Again, this is a myth. As long as the temperature in your freezer remains at a constant zero degrees, the frozen food should be perfectly good. This means that something you stored in the freezer five years ago can be defrosted and cooked and no ill effects felt. It means you can order some gorgeous frozen fish delivered to your door and store what you can’t use now for a later time without wasting any food or any money.
Myth: You Can Put Packaged Food Straight Into The Freezer
As great as frozen food is, and as much as we are extolling its virtues, and encouraging you to use your freezer more, there are some key points to remember when it comes to freezing food in the right way. One thing to think about is the packaging.
If you buy fresh food, the shop you buy it from has intended it to be eaten fairly quickly, even if it needs to be kept in the fridge before you do so. You might, however, want to keep it for longer, so you place it straight into the freezer in its packaging. However, the packaging for fresh food is different from the packaging for frozen food, since it allows some air in. If you don’t take your fresh food out of its packaging and place it into specially designed freezer bags, you could be freezing bacteria too, and the quality of the food when it defrosts might be lower.
