HOWTO divide a freezer-bag into individual servings before freezing

Lunch In a Box's tip for dividing the contents of a freezer-bag into individual portions is great, right up there with the soup-in-ice-cube-trays hack. This is the perfect compromise between freezing everything in tiny individual bags or having to hack individual frozen hunks off some foodberg at the back of the freezer.

Enter my Japanese-language freezing books. A standard tip for freezing ground foods or thick sauces in small portions is to first put the food into a large freezer bag and press it out as flat as possible, eliminating air pockets. (Making it thin speeds up defrost time due to the increased surface area, and pressing out excess air guards against freezer burn.) Use a long chopstick or ruler to create divisions within the food, forming individual portions. This way when you freeze the entire bag, you’ll be able to quickly break off just as much as you want to use, no more.

Link (via Neatorama)

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Tommy

I love and hate tips like these. Love ‘em because they’re so great. Hate ‘em because I never, ever woulda thought of it.
purefog

Um — “quickly break off just as much as you want to use, no more”? Not quite. For the first piece in any row, you will need to break off the entire row, and then break that piece off the end of the row, leaving a 2-piece fraction of a row plus the balance of the package. But, still.
lionelbrits

#6: Ditch the squares and simply divide it into narrow rows. This should be fine for ground meat. Although I’d feel pretty funny defrosting such a meat popsicle.
Atomische

I do the same thing with brown sugar — but instead of squares I freeze it into 1/4 cup “pucks” ready to use in baking recipes.
Practical Archivist

Brilliant and forehead slappingly simple. I love this idea.

P.S. You can freeze brown sugar? Go know.
Lexica

Atomische @ #8:

What’s the advantage of freezing brown sugar? I haven’t run across this technique before.
Avram

I want to go out and buy a bunch of chopped meat now, just so I can do this.

Even though I don’t think there’s room in my freezer to lay it out flat.
Atomische

Brown sugar gets hard as a rock pretty fast no matter how you store it. It’s not spoiled, just impossible to divide into measurable amounts.

So that’s why I pre-measure it into pucks and freeze, wrapped in plastic wrap.

When I want to use, I just sprinkle a puck with a couple drops of water, pop it into the microwave for about 10-15 seconds, and walla!
colin2go

This falls into the “duh” category.*

*The “duh” category is generally filled with idiots like me bumping into each other and exclaiming “Why didn’t *I* think of that?!”
Takuan

now that’s a pointer. I’ll use that for liver – and fava beans.
minamisan

i believe you’ve just violated a Wendy’s patent with those square burgers.
buddy66

@5, I’m with you; who’da thunk it?

@11, Hey, an Alfred Hitchcock rip-off: wife bashes hubby with a BIG chunk of stale brown sugar, then dissolves it to make a batch of fudge and offers some to the investigating police officer. Better than the original leg of lamb, no?