Batch cooking, as you may have guessed from the name, is the act of cooking large amounts of food in batches and then storing the food for a later date. Most of the time, the food that you have batch cooked is popped into freezable containers and stored in the freezer. Sometimes you may batch cook part of a meal, for example, pasta sauce, other times you may batch cook entire meals and freeze them for meals later on, such as pasta bakes or chillis.
Batch cooking your meals makes life so much easier, especially if you work long days, or often find that you don’t have enough time to create meals from scratch mid-week. If you need more convincing, here are 3 reasons why you should be batch cooking.
You have control over all the ingredients.
Some of our favourite meals that we love can contain foods that our bodies don’t love quite as much. Batch cooking provides you with a way to create multiple batches of food that only contain ingredients that you love.
Whether you’re trying to reduce the number of carbohydrates you consume, or you’re looking to create one of your favourite meals without a common allergen in it, batch cooking gives you full control over all the ingredients.
You can use fresh, healthy ingredients to create delicious food that you can then store in the freezer for a quick and easy midweek meal.
You should be batch cooking because it saves you time.
One of the reasons people who swear by batch cooking love it so much is because it saves so much time! In just one day, you can cook up, prepare, and store an entire week’s worth of meals.
Spending one day a week preparing meals for your family means that you’ll have more time left after a long day to enjoy your evenings and spend time with the people you love. Batch cooking your weekly meals means that you no longer have to worry about what’s on the menu for the evening’s meal, as you’ve already prepared the food in advance.
Batch cooking can even save you money.
If you’re a savvy shopper, batch cooking can save you hundreds of pounds on your grocery bill each year.
Buying in bulk is a great way to get ingredients for your batch cooking at a discounted price. Buying in bulk is cheaper than buying food items individually, therefore buying in bulk enables you to take advantage of great discounts on wholesale and reduced to clear items. It usually doesn’t matter if you’re purchasing items in wholesale stores such as Costco, or if you’re picking up ingredients from your local superstore in bulk packets – regardless of where you are, if you’re buying in bulk, it’s extremely likely you will be saving money.
You can also take advantage of reduced-to-clear and yellow sticker foods found in the supermarkets. Buying reduced-to-clear food and then immediately cooking them into deliciousness and freezing them means that you can create tasty and healthy meals for your family at a fraction of the original cost.