Question
Julie Cannon
What are your preferred ways of freezing and thawing stock? Container type, stacking, volume, thawing methods etc.
Answer
I make stock quite often because I usually will save all my scraps when I'm making different things, and put them into a freezer bag. And then basically, once that freezer bag fills up in the freezer, I'll take it out and make stock. So I end up getting a lot more stock than I typically use. But every so often, you just need it and you don't have it around, so freezing it is a great option. One of the ways that I like to do it is I'll actually make ice cubes, and I'll make the big kind of ice cubes that you'd see in specialty cocktails and stuff for bourbons and stuff like that. I'll use the bigger sized one that's about a two-inch by two-inch cube, and put stock into those and freeze them, and then put those into a freezer bag. So if I just need a little bit of stock, I can just take one of those big cubes out and put it into a dish to be able to add some nice flavor to it. If I'm doing it just for soups and soup season, which happens more often than not, I'm going to put them into a gallon freezer bag, seal it up really well, and then put it onto a sheet tray, and make sure it's just really flat on that sheet tray, and basically put them right next to each other. And it's just wide enough for the sheet tray to be able to go into the freezer and then come back out. And then you have basically kind of like, oop, sorry, a stacked brick of stock bags that you can put on top of each other that are frozen. So that's probably the easiest way. Just don't forget to date them. You want to date them to make sure that they're keeping them fresh. Typically, I don't keep them more than a season at all like that, but I've seen people keep them from six months to a year. I think that's a little overkill for me, but I'll usually use them within a couple of months and just kind of cycle through them. So I'll usually pull the freezer bag from the bottom, if I'm stacking on top to be able to make that happen. So those are the two methods that I like, Julie. I'm sure there are a bunch of other methods out there, but those are the ones that I use most often.
