Yes, you can freeze cooked pasta, and it is one of those quiet time-savers I wish I had started doing years ago. Cook a big pan once, freeze it in portions, and a hot bowl of pasta is three minutes away on a night when I have nothing left to give. The results are genuinely good too, better than most people expect, as long as you undercook it a touch and cool it fast. Here is how I do it, and where the pitfalls are. ...
Yes, you can freeze cooked chicken, and in my kitchen it is one of the jobs the freezer does best. A roast on Sunday, the last of a poached breast, the chicken picked off a carcass before I make stock: all of it freezes well and comes back as a quick lunch or the start of a curry. The freezing part is easy. What matters is the hour after cooking and the way you bring it back to life, because the cold preserves chicken, it does not clean it up. ...
You are halfway through a recipe, you crack the fridge open, and there are no eggs. Or someone at the table cannot eat them and the recipe calls for two. Before you write the bake off, know this: for most cakes, muffins, brownies and biscuits you can swap the eggs out and still get a good result. The catch is that there is no single magic replacement, because an egg is not doing one job in a recipe, it is doing two or three at once. Once you know which job matters in the bake in front of you, picking the right swap is easy. Here is what actually works, measured per egg, and how to choose. ...
Yes, you can freeze onions, and unlike a lot of vegetables they do not need blanching first. Peel them, chop or slice them, and they go straight into the freezer raw. They keep for months, they cost you almost nothing, and there is no more crying over the chopping board every single time a recipe starts with “first, dice an onion”. The one thing to be clear about from the start: frozen onions come back soft and a bit watery, so they are for cooking, not for a salad or a burger. Get that straight and freezing onions becomes one of the most useful habits in a busy kitchen. ...
Yes, you can freeze yoghurt, it is perfectly safe, and freezing does not kill the live cultures. The one thing to know before you start is that freezing changes the texture. Yoghurt is an emulsion of water, fat and protein, and freezing splits it, so what you thaw out is grainy and watery rather than smooth and glossy. That does not make it bad, it just makes it the wrong thing to eat straight from a pot with a spoon. Where frozen yoghurt shines is in smoothies, baking, cooking and cold treats, and if you have ever stood over a tub that is a day off its date wondering whether to bin it, freezing is the answer. Here is how I do it. ...
Yes, you can freeze potatoes, but not the way most people first try it. Peel a few spuds, cut them up, tip them straight into a freezer bag raw, and you will be disappointed. They come out grainy, watery, a bit grey and faintly sweet, which is not what anyone wants under a Sunday roast. The trick is that potatoes need to be cooked or at least part-cooked before they go anywhere near the freezer. Do that, and they freeze beautifully, whether it is mash, roasties, chips or diced potato for a hash. Below is how I handle each one, how long they keep, and the one rule that stops the whole lot going to waste. ...
Bicarbonate of soda and baking powder are not the same thing, and swapping one for the other spoon for spoon is how a cake ends up flat, soapy or oddly bitter. The quick version: bicarbonate of soda is a single ingredient that needs an acid to work, while baking powder already has that acid built in. Bicarb is also far stronger, roughly three to four times the lifting power of baking powder, so you use much less of it. Get those two facts straight and most baking confusion clears up on its own. Here is the full picture, with the exact ratios for when you run out of one and have only the other. ...
Yes, you can freeze mushrooms, but there is one thing worth knowing before you tip a punnet into a bag and shut the drawer: cook them first. Mushrooms are mostly water, and if you freeze them raw the ice crystals wreck their structure, so what comes out is limp and a bit slimy. Cook the water out before it freezes and you get a completely different result, mushrooms that still taste of something and hold up in a pan. That is the whole trick, and it takes about ten minutes. Below is exactly how I do it, how long they keep, and why you should never bother thawing them. ...
Raw chicken keeps for one to two days in the fridge, and the use-by date on the pack is the line you actually obey, not a smell test or a guess. That is the whole answer, and unlike a lot of storage questions this one has very little give in it. Raw poultry is the food I am strictest about in my kitchen, because it is the one most likely to carry campylobacter, the bug behind more UK food poisoning than any other. So this is a piece with firm edges: how long raw chicken really lasts, how to store it so it makes it that far, and the handful of rules that are worth being fussy about. None of it is complicated, but none of it is optional either. ...
Raw eggs in their shells keep for three to five weeks in the fridge, and in practice that means roughly to the best-before date on the box and a day or two beyond if you cook them properly. That is the number I actually run my kitchen on. We go through two or three dozen a week here, so a stray box surfacing from the back of the shelf is a weekly event, and I have stopped treating a passed date as a verdict. Here is how long eggs really last, why they carry the date they do, and the small storage habits that make the difference between an egg that lasts five weeks and one that quietly gives up in two. ...