A fridge or a freezer is considered to be a godsend, especially for people who live in warmer climates, like Nigeria. Thanks to a freezer you can save foods for months, which makes grocery shopping and cooking for your family much easier – now you can buy meat, vegetables and other essential products in bulk, divide them into convenient portions, and freeze them until you want to cook them. Plus, if you have a large freezing section in your fridge, you can cook in bulk as well, and simply reheat individual portions of your favourite meals. However, not all foods are meant to be frozen. Which foods should be left out of the microwave? Find out right now!
Salad greens
Greens are a great way to eat healthy – they are rich in nearly every vitamin and mineral imaginable. But salad greens are notorious for having a short shelf life, which means that in a couple of days your greens will turn brown or soft and limp. Nevertheless, freezing them is also not a good idea, since they will lose all their nutritional value and will be essentially useless for your diet. Instead you can buy salad greens as you need them.
Fried food
How often have you cooked delicious fried chicken or fish just to have half of the batch being left after dinner because everyone is already full? In this case you may have thought about freezing the leftover fried foods and reheating them later? Well, there is one good reason not to do it – as soon as you take the frozen fried chicken out of the freezer and reheat it, the crunchy parts will go soggy and you’ll end up with a soft, limp chicken that no one really wants to eat. It’s better to cook as much fried food as you need.
Raw eggs
It’s not often that you need to preserve chicken eggs for a really long time, but even if you do, freezing them is hardly recommended – since raw eggs mostly consist of liquid, the liquid will expand as it turns solid in the freezer, causing your eggs to crack. If you don’t want to receive a dozen or more of unusable eggs, don’t put them into a freezer – in case you have leftover raw eggs, there are much better and more delicious ways to use them.
Dairy products
Milk, sour cream, yoghurt and other dairies should never be put into the freezer. At the very best the low temperatures will change the structure of your yoghurt or cream, causing them to separate, which is not only gross, but also means you can’t use them for cooking. Milk is a slightly different story: if you freeze milk and want to drink it straight afterwards, you may be thrown off by its lumpy texture, but thawed milk can actually be used for cooking – just make sure to thaw it in a freezer for about a day.
Potatoes
If you’ve accidentally peeled too many potatoes and want to save some for later, better submerge them into water for a day instead of freezing them, since frozen potatoes lose their color and special texture, meaning your potato dish definitely won’t turn as expected. Cooked potatoes are also not meant for freezing – they will become too watery, causing your dish to taste worse than it normally would and the cooking process to go completely wrong.
Cheese
If you have a bit of leftover cheese, we recommend cooking something with it, like pizza, pasta, or delicious cheese pastries, instead of freezing, because frozen cheese tastes and looks nothing like the original product. This is true both for hard and soft cheeses. Soft cheese will lose its light and fluffy texture, becoming dry and unappetizing. Hard cheeses survive freezing a little bit better, but you won’t be able to slice or shred cheese neatly afterwards – it will simply crumble into pieces.
Fresh fruits and veggies
Although you can often come across frozen vegetables and fruits in supermarkets, they undergo a different freezing process, which freezes them almost instantly, before they lose their texture or nutritional value. Freezing produce with a home freezer takes much longer, which results in completely inedible fruits and veggies, especially the ones that are rich in water, since they turn from fresh, crunchy produce into limp and slimy mess after just a few hours in the freezer. Again, to avoid this make sure to only buy as much fresh produce as you currently need, so that you don’t have any leftovers.
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