Flash Freeze Your Meals and Save Serious Nutrition and Clean Up

Here is yet another non-cooking related use for any non-stick silicon mat: they are able to be used as freezer or fridge mats since they are totally water proof. I hit on this problem just the other day. My freezer includes a wire shelf in it and I wanted to flash freeze some fish. This is a new method I am looking to use to keep soft foods whole when they are frozen. But I wanted to make this happen without having it dripping onto the foods below the shelf. I did not want to wrap the fish in anything it could cling to (until after it had frozen solid) But, I realized placing a paper towel beneath it would result in whatever water dripped from them to freeze the paper to the food below it.
I first try to put a pan in the freezer but I didn’t have 1 small enough for (my freezer is fairly full) and I didn’t want the fish to get stuck to it. So, I utilised a mat and the issue was solved. The flexibility of the mat permitted me to work around the rest of the freezer’s contents and then the fish froze up just wonderfully without dripping. I did need to pass just a little warm water between the mat and fish to get it unfastened while not tearing up the fish (which is the whole objective to flash freezing). But I was able to get the fish off of the mat without having issues and mat cleaned up as simple as usual.
For flash freezing to work right, your freezer must be extremely cold. If it is over zero degrees F then the whole process of quickly freezing food is problematic and will not work. The whole thought would be to freeze food extremely quickly. This seals in the vitamins and nutrition in the food and makes the food rock hard. For soft food items like fish and some veggies, this assists safeguard them from crumbling and falling apart. The draw back of freezing everything, obviously, is the fact that the water in the food expands and destroys the food’s cell construction so it tends to fall apart worse when thawed. A good chef can use that to their advantage when they prepare for it in advance. Creating fish, steak, or veggies that fall apart in your mouth can be done.
But, to flash freeze soft food items, they can not stick to the freezer rack or fall apart just before it is frozen. This is when the silicone mat is really a n actual help.