How do I run a batch cooking day from one shop?

Batch cooking fails for two reasons, and neither is the recipes. The first is treating it as cooking seven dinners back to back, which takes all day and produces a week of identical meals. The second is leaving the cooling to the end, when you are tired, which is where the food safety goes wrong. Both are solved by running the day to a plan.

What you'll need

• Three to four hours
• Oven, hob and at least one large pot
• Shallow containers and freezer bags
• Labels or masking tape and a marker
• A sink you can empty for the cooling stage

Step by step

1. Plan three bases, not seven dinners.A base is something that becomes several different meals — a tomato and mince or lentil sauce, a tray of roast vegetables, a batch of braised chicken thighs, a pot of dal, a pan of grains. Three bases with different finishes gives more variety across a week than seven fixed dishes, because you assemble rather than reheat.
2. Count the portions before you write the list.How many meals for how many people, minus the evenings you will be out, minus one deliberate gap. Then work out how much of each base that means. Shopping without this number is how people end up with fourteen portions of chilli.
3. Shop once, to that list.One shop, from the count. Check what is already in the freezer and cupboard before you go, and build the bases around what is already there.
4. Do all the prep first, in one block.Every onion, every clove of garlic, every carrot, chopped at once. Roughly forty-five minutes. The board and knife get washed once, not five times, and you can see what you have. Put each prepped ingredient in a bowl and line them up.
5. Start the longest thing first.Whatever takes longest goes on before anything else — usually the oven items or a braise. Everything else fits around it. The commonest scheduling error is starting the quick thing first and then waiting.
6. Run three pieces of equipment at once.Oven doing two trays — roast vegetables on one shelf, chicken thighs or a traybake on another. Hob doing the big pot of tomato or lentil base. A third pan doing rice, grains or pulses. Nothing waits for anything else, and that is what turns six hours into two.
7. Season the bases lightly.A base that is already heavily spiced can only become one thing. Salt properly but hold back the chilli, the herbs and the strong flavourings until you finish each meal — that is where the variety comes from.
8. Schedule the cooling stage, and start it early.As each thing comes off the heat it goes straight into shallow containers no more than 5cm deep, standing in a sink of cold water, lids off. Do not stack finished pans on the worktop to deal with later. A batch day makes a very large quantity of hot food at once, and that is exactly when cooling goes wrong.
9. Label before anything moves.Contents, date, and number of portions, written on the container before it goes anywhere. Unlabelled tubs become unidentifiable frozen bricks within a fortnight.
10. Split fridge from freezer deliberately.The next two days' worth in the fridge, everything else in the freezer, frozen flat in bags where possible. Add the new items to the list on the freezer door.
11. Write down what each base is going to become.On the fridge, next to the plan. 'Tomato base → bolognese Mon, chilli Wed, jacket potato Fri.' Without it, the bases sit in the freezer while you order a takeaway, which is the other classic failure.

Tips

• Wash up as the oven runs. Fifteen minutes of dead time at the start is worth a clean kitchen at the end.
• Cook one thing you actually want to eat that evening. A batch day that ends with nothing for dinner feels like work rather than a good idea.
• Two bases done well beats four done badly. Scale up as you learn how long your kitchen actually takes.
• Freeze in the portion sizes you actually eat. A four-portion block that has to be thawed whole is the reason batch food gets wasted.

Common mistakes

• Leaving all the cooling until the end — You are tired, the sink is full of pans, and several kilograms of hot food are sitting on the worktop. This is where a productive day turns into food that has to be thrown away. Cool each item as it finishes.
• Cooking seven complete dinners — It takes all day, it produces a monotonous week, and any change of plan wastes a meal. Bases with different finishes take a third of the time and survive contact with a week that does not go as planned.
• Cooking things that do not keep well — Fried food, salads, cream sauces, plain pasta and potatoes in liquid all deteriorate badly in the fridge or freezer. Batch the base and cook those elements fresh in the four minutes they take.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask