‘HOW TO’ Friday: How to organize your fridge and freezer

Some of you probably know exactly what each draw and shelf in your fridge is intended for, whereas others have probably never given a second thought to the fact that there may have been method behind the madness of fridge design. As every Friday will now be ‘How to’ Friday, here are our tips on how to organize your fridge and freezer.

Fridge

• We’ll start with an easy one; the bottle rack in the door of the fridge. I’m sure most of you already use this for its intended purpose, but if not the n start now, laying bottles on their side in the fridge can cause leeks onto food below.
• The compartments above this are ideal for butter and cheese, as the door is slightly warmer than the rest of the fridge.
• The salad crisper drawer found at the bottom of the fridge is, funnily enough, intended for salad and other veg, as this section is held at a specific humidity to stop them loosing moisture.
• As for the shelves in the main body of the fridge, these should be organized with health & hygiene in mind. A professional kitchen will have the foods with a higher cooking temperature on the lower shelves, so that if any food drips from one shelf to another, cooking will eradicate cross contamination.
• Keeping this in mind for your domestic fridge, store pre-cooked meats and any ready to eat foods on the upper shelves with raw meats and fish on the lower shelves – always consider whether any cross contamination could occur from dripping.
• Tip: It may be a crossing the line in ‘too anal’ for some people, but if you have a larger fridge with a lot of shelves and want to ensure your fridge maintains the order which you have restored, you could try labeling each shelf with sticky address labels. (I know….)

Freezer

• You may think that the freezer doesn’t need the level of organization the fridge does, well you would be wrong! How many times have you come to get a chicken breast out of the freezer to discover you have no idea how long it’s been there, if it even is chicken and that you can’t actually separate it from the rest of the pack. So bearing this in mind:
• Always separate any singular food items into separate bags depending on the capacity in which you are going to eat them (i.e. don’t freeze a pack of 10 pork steaks together if you live alone, or you will have to get the hammer out to separate them)
• Always write the date and what the food is on the freezer bag – you always think you’ll remember what it is and how long it’s been there, yet are always surprised by the random things you pull out of your freezer draws.
• Keep similar foods in the same draws – it just makes good sense!