Planning To Save Money on Your Grocery Bill? Buy Food or Grow in Bulk and Freeze It!

With the way food prices are skyrocketing right now, I know we are looking at ways to keep the food budget at a reasonable level and one of the best ways to do this is to either buy or grow food in bulk and freeze the excess. With a few teenagers in our house right now, I’ve been buying in bulk the majority of the time anyways and it is just so much more cost effective.

If you are serious about conserving food by buying or growing in bulk and freezing what you won’t use right away, it helps to first know what room you have in your freezer. If you only have the tiny freezer that comes with your fridge it may be a good time to consider buying a separate freezer to keep in your garage or a spare room in your home.

When you have decided how much you can freeze, here are some more tips to help.

What Food You Can Freeze?

Let’s start with what you are going to be able to freeze so you know what to start buying in bulk. There are the obvious choices like most types of meat, poultry, and seafood. You probably already freeze portions of ground beef, steak, fish, shrimp, chicken, and pork before you use it. While you want to look up the exact storage times for each type of meat or seafood, it will last an average of 4-12 months if sealed properly.

You can also freeze just about any type of vegetable or fruit, though fruits with thick skin like citrus and bananas should be peeled first. These work great if you use produce for smoothies, as you can put them right in your blender from their frozen state. My favourite fruit to freeze is bananas! They are so versatile. They make the best banana bread and banana muffins and the are so good in a smoothie, it make the smoothie super creamy with no dairy added. Or you can make banana nicecream!

Now for a few surprises. Did you know you can freeze cheese? You do need to shred it first, but it allows you to buy bigger packages of cheese and freeze it so it never goes to waste. You can save quite a bit of money by doing it this way. You can also freeze sticks of butter if you wrap it in cling film or foil, then put it in a freezer bag.

Tomatoes are great to toss in a freezer bag and freeze for later.

Tips for Preparing Foods to Freeze

It is really important that you understand the proper way to freeze different types of foods. For example, if you want to freeze cheese, it should be shredded first. Avocados and bananas need to be peeled before being frozen.

For meat and poultry, decide beforehand if you want to divide them up or not. This is necessary if you will only need some of the meat to be defrosted, and not all at once. Otherwise, keeping them together is fine.

Labels are a Good Idea

Make sure you label everything! No matter how much you think you will remember when you go to use it, you never know. Trust me, I have popped my head in the freezer to find something so many times to find something for dinner and found a container or bag of “mystery meat” or mystery meals especially frozen soups.

To avoid freezer burn and using up food that should have been thrown away earlier, write down what it is, the date you put it in, and when it expires.

Consider Cooking Before Freezing

Another option for freezing food you buy in bulk is to cook some of it before freezing. Most types of meat, fish, and poultry can be frozen in its cooked form, just make sure you let it cool down before putting it into freezer bags or storage containers.

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Planning To Save Money on Your Grocery Bill? Buy Food or Grow in Bulk and Freeze It!