The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Freezer has role in meal planning
Everyday appliance can revolutionize cooking.
Well-known chefs are often asked to name their secret weapon in the kitchen: the tool they credit most with transforming the way they cook. The responses are inevitably revealing — whether it’s a state-of-the-art sous vide machine or the cast-iron skillet they inherited from Granny.
For Ashley Christensen, it’s her freezer. That’s an answer you might expect from a retired home ec teacher, but probably not from a James Beard awardwinning chef. Yet she contends that the ability to maximize the potential of this everyday appliance saves time and money, preserves seasonal flavors and avoids waste both at her restaurants and the home she shares with Kaitlyn Goalen, her wife and business partner in the AC Restaurants hospitality group in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Goalen collaborated with Christensen on her first cookbook about her flagship restaurant, “Poole’s: Recipes and Stories From a Modern Diner.” During the recipe testing, they got adept at making “workhorse elements” of recipes that could be made ahead and frozen, such as certain sauces and doughs. That led them to build a game plan that could be customized for any kitchen situation, which they detail in their newly released second book: “It’s Always Freezer Season: How to Freeze Like a Chef With 100 Makeahead Recipes” (Ten Speed, $30).
“Our world exists on inventory and the most imaginative way to use it,” Christensen told me on a Zoom call with Goalen. To them, organizing and preplanning are part of the creativity and the fun.
Both come from families of avid cooks who knew the value of a well-stocked freezer. “Growing up
on the coast, we did a lot of pier fishing and regularly fit whatever we caught into our full-size freezer in the garage,” Christensen said. “We also had two huge gardens and did pickling and fermenting and all kinds of putting things up. My dad was into making fresh pesto and had one of the original Cryovac machines.”
Goalen, a Dallas native, learned the art of make-ahead meals from her working mom, who also gave her the idea of freezing balls of raw cookie dough so they could be baked fresh, a few at a time, whenever the sweet tooth struck.
Today, they combine those early lessons with Christensen’s professional experience in maintaining
their three home freezers — one in the kitchen for daily meals, and two in the garage for long-term storage and recipe testing. The book details how they manage their contents to avoid a “freezer black hole scenario,” the best materials for packaging, and the safest ways to thaw.
The recipes fall into the last two sections — one for the “freezer pantry” (a large batch of stovetop pulled pork, for instance, that can be reincarnated into Carnitas Tacos or Potato Pork Cakes), and the other for fully made dishes such as Deviled Crab Rigatoni and Zucchini-poppyseed Bread.
As Goalen puts it, “It’s really just about making the most of what you’ve got using these easy and flexible techniques so you can truly feel the joy of cooking.”
ALSO INSIDE
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Try these recipes using your own “freezer pantry,” F2