Good freezer bags and containers are essential for home cooking. You can use them to store leftovers or keep your bulk cooking organized.
What Kind of Freezer Bags and Containers are Best?
The first thing you’ll need are freezer-ready containers made of glass or BPA-free plastic. You have two main choices when it comes to these containers: bento box compartmented style or single dish container.
What you need will depend on how you plan on using them. The bento box style is great if you’re creating a homemade freezer meal of several dishes to take to an office or school to heat and eat.
The single bags and containers are better if you’re freezing leftovers or bulk cooking items. You can freeze a package of soup, meat, vegetables or nearly anything.
Waterproof Freezer Stickers
Waterproof removable freezer stickers are essential to knowing the dates when you put each food in the freezer. You can note what the food is, when you froze it, and every date when you’ve gotten it out since.
While you can buy bags that have a space to write the contents and dates on the front, we prefer using waterproof freezer stickers. That way we can take the stickers off and reuse the bags.
Note: disposable containers can usually be reused. You can get more than one use out of most “disposable” bags and containers. You can run bags right through the dishwasher to reuse.
It’s hard to say exactly how many times you’ll be able to reuse a freezer bag. The bags that are marketed as “reusable” are likely to outlast them by a good bit. But again, even getting three uses out of each bag would triple their value to you.
This is a great money saving tip, and it also helps you put less plastic in the landfill. All of the following bags and boxes are available from Amazon.
- Reusable Silicone Zip Freezer Bags are much more environmentally friendly than plastic because you can reuse them many more times than plastic. These bags are sturdy, long-lasting, and easy to clean.
- Reusable Square Bottom Silicone Bags. These bags are also silicone with all the benefits of that, but they have a sort of square bottom that can make them sit better on the shelf of a freezer.
- Check out these BPA-free plastic Bento Boxes with one large compartment for an entree or sandwich and two smaller compartments for side dishes. Microwave, freezer, and dishwasher safe.
- You can also buy an assortment of reusable freezer bags in different sizes. As mentioned above, normal plastic bags can be used at least a few times, but “reusable” ones could last a year or longer. These are made of PEVA, which is BPA-free and sometimes biodegradable.
- These Stainless Steel storage bowls with silicone lids are much sturdier than plastic, but nearly as lightweight. They’re easier to handle than glass bowls and they don’t take up as much room in the freezer. Dishwasher safe, too.
- Or these single compartment freezer meal boxes let you store one item in bulk in the freezer for easy meal prep at dinner time. Also microwave, freezer, and dishwasher safe.
- These 32 ounce tall round freezer containers are great for freezing soup and other items with a lot of liquid. They’re incredibly airtight. Tip: sometimes you get smaller versions of these if you order soup to go from a restaurant. Hold onto those and re-use them!
- If you’re trying to avoid using plastic, you can get nice glass freezer containers that also work wonderfully. Not every glass container works well for freezing, but these do. Microwave safe, oven safe, and the bowls are dishwasher safe (though not the lids).
- These soup containers also work from freezer to microwave to dishwasher, and the secure lids keep liquids from leaking. These can also be great for sauces, gravies, mashed potatoes and refried beans, just for starters.
- Small snack boxes can be great for carting around a single-dish lunch. These are also microwave, freezer, and dishwasher safe.
- 1-gallon Freezer bags can also be great for storage. And you can use them in the microwave if you follow instructions – always place them on a microwave safe dish of some sort just in case they overflow or tip over.
- Sometimes all you need is a 1 quart freezer bag. These are great for smaller items like leftover side dishes.