Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Half Hour)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Half Hour)
This event was on
Tuesday, June 24, 2025 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.
Question:

Can you share any tips for maintaining freshness and prepping plant-based food? I'm transitioning to a plant-based diet.
— Julia Balducki
Answer:
Maintaining freshness and prepping plant-based food. So maintaining freshness I think is really, um, you know, the best way to be able to do that is to buy, uh, as in season and local as possible. So if you're eating locally, basically if you think about this, like if you pick any fruit or vegetable from its spine, um, it's starting to decompose from that movement on. So it's losing its flavor, but it's also losing its nutrient value, um, starting at the moment you pick it. So the closer you can get, uh, your food to the source, the more flavor and the more nutrients it will have in it. It's one of the reasons that if you grow your own tomatoes in the backyard, in the peak of the season, they're going to be so good. The other part of that is seasonality, right? So if you're eating foods that are in season, they're more likely to come from a closer, uh, source to you, and they're going to have a better flavor. So if you're buying tomatoes in the middle of January and they're being exported from somewhere like Mexico, um, it takes 'em a very long time to get to wherever you are. Um, I'm speaking in the United States. I'm in Madison, Wisconsin. So if I'm buying a tomato in the middle of, uh, January and it's coming from Mexico, it's probably gonna take about seven to 10 days after it's been picked to be able to get to me. It has to be picked, put into a bushel and put onto a truck, and then to a train, and then that train comes across the states and has to be delivered by another truck to the grocery store that I'm buying it from. So it takes a long time for it to get there, um, that entire time it's losing its flavor and losing its nutrients. So by the time it gets here, it doesn't taste so much like a tomato. It's just kinda like a watery kind of, uh, you know, blob kind of a thing that tastes a little bit like a tomato. But if I were to buy that from a local farmer or grow them myself, um, as soon as I pick that tomato, I can slice it open, it's gonna have a really full flavor to it and a lot of nutrients in it as well too. And that goes with any, you know, fruit or vegetable. So that's basically what I would say for freshness is try to buy as close to a home as possible, um, as local as possible, and then also try to buy in season when possible if you're not able to do it in season. Frozen vegetables are a great way to be able to get a big flavor as well too, because what happens with frozen vegetables, typically they have fra flash freezing facilities very close to where they're growing the produce, and then they'll freeze them very quickly to be able to get the flavor stuck in them right away. Um, you know, canned vegetables are kind of the same way too. Like if, you know, you open a can of tomatoes, it always tastes very tomatoey, it tastes just like a tomato should. That's because they're picked at the pinkness of ripeness and then canned to be able to keep that flavor in at the same time. So, um, you know, if you're living in the northern regions where you're not being able to grow things as much, um, you know, that's a great way to be able to keep, uh, freshness on the same way, oddly enough, through frozen and canned. But, um, during, you know, months where you can grow that, getting it as close to possible or close to you as possible is best. Um, now prepping plant-based food that kind of depends on you and what you like to do. Um, you know, I have a, a live event that I did, um, that you can search on here too. It was, um, uh, I think it was called meal based prep. And Patrick, I might ask you to be able to put a link for that somewhere, if you can find it in here. Um, but basically what I showed for that is, um, being able to take all your, you know, go to the grocery store store, get everything that you you need, but when you get home, um, put everything away that needs to go in the, the freezer and the pantry, but then get your produce out and get a cutting board out and cut it up into usable sized pieces and then put it into airtight containers. Uh, that way you can basically, you know, stock all the things that you need to be able to have prepped in your refrigerator. You're essentially creating a line on in your refrigerator. And what I mean by a line is that a restaurant, um, when you go to a restaurant, they don't have, you know, they don't, you don't order like a, a meal like, or like pad thai and you start chopping up the vegetable in the back there, right? They have everything chopped and marinating and everything ready for people to come in and order. Now, if you do that same thing in your own, um, kitchen, you can really make cooking really fast and easy. So if you have your tofu already marinating, or you have your vegetables all cut up for the week, um, you can basically take out the ingredients that you need for the meal and make your meal in less than 10 minutes. That's how you're able to get meals so quickly at a restaurant because they've done all the prep ahead of time. Um, so that is probably one of the best ways that I would say to be able to prep for plant-based food diets is to be able to prep ahead of time, is when you get home to the grocery store, do most of the prep, then it puts about an hour into it, you know, after you're doing your grocery shopping. But it's well worth it in the week because that hour spent then is not being spent in the week to prep the food, uh, at the moment when you're actually eating.
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