10 things chefs love to have in the freezer
We’ve learned an incredible amount from months of quarantine. For example, from chefs who suddenly found themselves cooking at home a lot more. And they do that just as often as ordinary mortals, using simple ingredients and things from the freezer. What kinds of things? These are the ten things chefs recommend filling your freezer with:
Pancetta
The fattier, the better, and wonderfully versatile from morning to night. With an egg for breakfast, as a BLT for lunch, and in carbonara in the evening.
Fish collars
Interesting! This is a kind of neck section of the fish, although fish don’t really have necks. But it sits between the head and body and is a wonderfully firm, delicious piece of fish. You’ll find them in the freezer section of better Asian supermarkets, and they’re very cheap. Great for intensely flavorful stock, but also irresistible when marinated and fried in a pan or cooked on the grill. 
Potato croquettes
Comfort food at its best in corona times: those simple golden bites you can snack on, serve as a side dish, or mash slightly and load up with, for example, sour cream, bacon bits, chives and jalapeños, and grated cheddar.
Ground meat
Perhaps an obvious choice, but always the easiest meat to use for making a good chili con carne or bolognese.
Fat from fried ground meat
Scoop the meat out of the pan, let the fat solidify, and keep it in small containers. A tasty alternative to oil or butter the next time you fry meat. Also delicious added to stock when you’re making ramen.
Wine
What a tip! Pour leftovers into an ice cube tray, and use the red for, say, that bolognese, and the white to make gravy with the browned bits when you’ve just fried a delicious chop, for example.
Shrimp
Always easy to turn into dinner, stir-fried with frozen edamame and oyster sauce and served with rice, for example, or with broccoli and a little cream for a simple pasta dish.
Corn kernels
Also great combined with that ground meat, a dollop of chipotle hot sauce and rice or tacos, or used in Indonesian corn fritters.
Bananas
Ripe bananas keep so well for smoothies or banana bread, but if you let them thaw slightly and slice them, you have a wonderfully simple dessert for the kids. See if you can convince them it’s ice cream.
Rocket popsicles
Rocket popsicles? Yes. As one chef put it: nutritionally about as useful as a chocolate teapot, but they make me very happy. And that’s definitely worth something too.
Read also:
- 10 things you can (also!) keep in the freezer
- How to: cook when coronavirus anxiety has set in
- How to: find alternatives to fresh cream
