The Best Way to Freeze Individual Servings of Shredded Chicken
Let me start by saying that I cook about four meals for dinner. With three children under the age of ten, I don’t bother with experiments, delicious-sounding lentil curry soups, or interesting new flavors. It took me more than a few heartbreaking rejections of “fun recipes” I wanted to try, like Middle Eastern shrimp skewers and absolutely bomb butter chicken, to learn my lesson. After about a hundred “that’s nasty” any once-adventurous cooking bone that was in my body left the building, where it will remain until the little Cheez-It and dinosaur-nugget lovers that I live with stop gagging, when I encounter them. with new products that taste amazing.
However, one of those four (very repetitive) meals is the chicken quesadilla. I do this every week and every week I have leftover chicken. The chicken, which I then put in Tupperware to slowly rot in my fridge because it would make me feel too guilty to throw it in the bin right away. (Also because, despite evidence to the contrary, I keep hoping I’ll remake that sliced chicken somewhere else. The forces of delusion are strong.)
This happens almost every time I buy a sliced chicken (or peel the meat from a grilled chicken, which, although more economical and plentiful, does not suit me).
So this trick, from Lifehacker reader u/knowonelse , comes into my life at just the right time. Well actually a day late – I just did my weekly “chicken trash/self-flagellation” routine last night, but a good time to save this lesson nonetheless.
Take any leftover grilled chicken or pre-packaged shredded chicken you have, divide it into muffin tins and freeze. After freezing, pour these small portions into a freezer bag for later use. Therefore, chicken can be thawed in small batches to prevent large quantities from thawing, which can lead to additional wastage and spoilage. (This is especially helpful if you buy large quantities of hand-grilled chicken from Costco, for example .) Add these small, thawed portions to chicken salad, chicken pie, chicken soup, next week’s quesadillas—any recipe that calls for shredding or grill cooking. hen.
All you need for this is enough room in the freezer for the cupcake pans, as well as the brainpower to remember that you froze them in the first place.