From transforming an ingredient’s cellular structure to controlling how quickly it cooks, the freezer is a culinary powerhouse
One of the most iconic dishes of Jonathan Waxman’s career comes from a freezer-related disaster that occurred about 15 years ago. He and chef Justin Smillie were cooking for a party at Waxman’s home when Smillie realized all too late that they had completely forgotten to defrost the handmade gnocchi they were planning to serve.
Smillie threw a skillet full of butter and olive oil on the stovetop and tossed the frozen gnocchi right into the pan. As they turned golden, Waxman added some Parmesan and truffles. “It was like the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life,” he says. “Isn’t that crazy?”
As Waxman explains, cooking the frozen gnocchi directly in the skillet allows a crust to form on the outside, trapping moisture to steam the inside of the gnocchi. “It’s tender, cooked through, and sort of fluffy, but the outside is crispy,” he says. “The freezing process in this respect was the gnocchi’s best friend.” Now, Waxman’s restaurant, Barbuto, sells about 120 servings of skillet-browned gnocchi (all from frozen) per night.
While the freezer may have a reputation as the place where leftovers go to die, it can do so much more than store forgotten food and give your ice cubes a weird taste. For chefs, it’s a way to transform the cell structure of certain vegetables, make unwieldy proteins easily sliceable, and control how quickly something cooks.
Stocking up
New York chefs Marc Forgione of Trattoria One Fifth and Erik Ramirez of Llama San and Llama Inn both clarify their stocks using a freezer method that Heston Blumenthal wrote about 19 years ago. The technique involves setting a stock with gelatin (or making a stock that’s rich with gelatin from the ingredients you’re using), freezing it, and then slowly defrosting it through a coffee filter or cheesecloth. As a bonus, using an ice cube tray speeds up the freezing process and means that you can have small amounts of clarified stock on demand.
While some methods for clarifying stock, like the popular “egg raft” method, can affect flavor, this one keeps the flavor of your stock intact, with a method that’s simple enough for almost any home cook to replicate. “By avoiding heat, the freezer method helps preserve the natural state, flavors, and nutritional content of the product,” says Ramirez. “Heat can sometimes alter the taste, and with this method, you keep the product in its raw form.”
A path to perfect proteins
Breaking free from the “fresher is better” paradigm, Tony Inn, the chef of New York’s Kin Gin, makes the case for why some time in the fridge or freezer can seriously improve a good piece of fish. “I am fascinated with aging and fermenting ingredients, and fish aging is a cornerstone technique of Asian cuisine,” he says. This comes into play especially in the saba yaki he serves — a dry-aged mackerel that’s grilled and topped with miso mayo, pickled shiso, and grilled lemon. “For saba yaki, we canoe-cut whole mackerel and cure it with kombu salt for three days,” Inn says. “This intensifies the flavor and removes excess moisture. We then freeze it to preserve amino acids and maintain its final shape.”
Inn explains that while a long stint in the freezer can leave your fish freezer-burnt, using the freezer in a controlled way for a week or less can improve the protein. “Especially if you’re serving it raw, I would absolutely suggest freezing it for a day or two to slow down some of the bacteria,” he says. When he worked at Masa and Morimoto, the freezer was similarly used as an extra safety method, even though the fish was very carefully sourced. “If you do it under the right premise and within controlled timing and temperature, I think it’s absolutely a game changer,” Inn says. Even if you’re just picking up a small piece of salmon from the grocery store, he adds, salting and freezing the fish can help the protein firm up before you cook it.
If you’ve ever tried to cut a floppy fillet of fish into tidy portions before cooking, you know that freezing a protein can also make it significantly easier to cut (a trick that Inn uses for steak too). Cookbook author Diane Kochilas leans on the freezer when making seafood sausages or carpaccio. “Especially with octopus,” she explains, “by cooking it, then wrapping it in plastic wrap, freezing, then shaving into very thin slices.” Similarly, Nando Chang of Itamae AO in Miami uses the freezer to solidify his octopus terrine into a perfectly sliceable terrazzo of tentacles. Even custardy foie gras can become shaveable if you freeze it like chef James Bailey does at Momofuku Las Vegas, before grating it over diced, cured tuna and strawberries.
Just like freezing can make a mushy ingredient easier to slice, it can also make softer ingredients easier to handle for dredging and frying. Ben Triola, the chef of the Chloe in New Orleans, freezes raw egg yolks to give them a jammier texture before dredging and frying them, or simply using them to top steak tartare. Gustavo Tzoc of New York’s Junoon and Jazba freezes portions of his dahi vada batter before frying it so that the fritters won’t fall apart in the oil.
A better vegetable
While you may already be familiar with the virtues of freezing your sweet potatoes before baking them for extra fluffy insides, or freezing your tofu before frying for an especially firm bite, the possibilities for plant-based cooking don’t end there. Kochilas says that she uses the freezer to firm up potatoes or vegetable fritters before frying.
Kate Ray, a chef who writes the newsletter Soft Leaves, tells me that she got into freezing mushrooms after picking up a few boxes of mushrooms from Smallhold when they closed down their Brooklyn farm. “For king oyster mushrooms, I slice them thinly and then freeze immediately, without cooking,” she says. “When I’m ready to use them, I let them defrost enough to shake all the ice crystals off them and then mix up a basic ‘bacon’ marinade — soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, maple syrup, smoked paprika, maybe a little MSG. Because the freezing process extracts some of their water and breaks them down a little, they soak up slightly more marinade.” After marinating, Ray cooks them at 375 degrees until they’re crispy.
Don’t forget dessert
In the realm of desserts, the freezer comes in handy in many ways beyond the occasional batch of ice cream. If your kitchen runs hot, try freezing and grating butter for rough puff pastry, pie crust, or scones. If you’re in the mood for kakigori but don’t have a shaved ice machine, you can take a page from cookbook author Frankie Gaw’s playbook and just freeze some strawberries to Microplane into a big feathery pile.
In her recipe for magnolia blossom buttercream cake, from her cookbook Forage & Feast, Chrissy Tracey makes the case for resting cakes for 30 minutes in the freezer before layering and icing them. The trick was one that her soon-to-be mother-in-law shared a few years ago, when Tracey was knee-deep in catering jobs. “I always let them fully cool before icing them, but I still would run into that issue where you get some flecks of the cake in the icing,” Tracy says. Freezing means that the icing will go on cleaner, and the cake layers will stay intact. “Once it gets back to room temperature, it’s still perfectly moist, but it keeps the integrity of the cake so that icing is a breeze.”
So if you’re tempted to write off frozen cakes as dry, frozen fish as old, and frozen vegetables as leathery, just remember that some of your favorite restaurants are using this appliance not just as a timesaver or a way to maximize wholesale costs, but as a means to make food taste better.
Anna Hezel is a New York-based journalist and the author of Tin to Table and Lasagna.
Subin Yang is a South Korean illustrator currently based in NYC. She graduated with a BFA in illustration from Pacific Northwest College of Art and makes images using colorful blocky shapes and loose line work inspired by themes of home, culture, and identity.
