The One Hack You'll Need When Freezing Sauces And Leftovers

Leftovers may seem like an unglamorous part of life, but they're a great way to save an amazing meal for later. You can even completely transform leftovers by turning them into soup. However, when you have a lot of food left to save, storage can become a problem, especially if you have containers of sauces and liquids that can take up a lot of room. When space is at a premium, every little bit counts, so you sometimes have to think outside of the box when storing food. 

Fortunately, there are solutions, such as Melissa Clark's space-saving freezer hack, which stresses the importance of flattening things before freezing them. While speaking with Rachael Ray, Clark claimed that freezing sauces and liquids on a sheet pan before portioning them into bags is the key to saving as much freezer space as possible. That said, this isn't the only method of flat storage you can use. 

For example, if you're in a rush and need to put things away fast, you might not have time to pre-freeze things. Instead, you can portion out your sauces, soups, spreads, and other leftovers into freezer-safe bags and lay them on their side to freeze flat. For foods needing some help leveling out, you can use a bench scraper to smooth things over. As an aside, a bench scraper, like OXO's stainless steel scraper, is also great for cutting pre-frozen sauces into perfectly flat and level portions for bagging. 

When you freeze your food flat, not only are you saving space, but you also make organizing your frozen goods so much more efficiently. Instead of bulky containers getting in the way of everything or haphazardly filled bags being pushed to the back, you can have neat, obviously identifiable stacks. This means it's easier to see what you have and grab what you need, and it can cut down on food waste because nothing will get lost behind a too-big container. 

To make things even more organized, you can use something like YouCopia FreezeUp freezer bins that come with dividers so you can divide your frozen food up by type. Plus, bins like those help keep the flat packs from falling over if you're storing them vertically. 

Keep in mind that it's always best to store your frozen foods in the body of your freezer and not the door. This is because the door is the warmest area of the freezer, and every time you open it, the food stored there is exposed to the most temperature fluctuation. While freezing food flat does help prevent freezer burn because there is less room for air in the bag to impact food quality, it can still suffer if things begin thawing and refreezing too much.