Meal Prep In Advance - How Long Is Safe? (ingredients, mushrooms, frozen)
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So I've been doing meal prep - spent all day Sunday baking chicken breasts in different sauces and roasting veggies and making potatoes and came up with a fritatta that will feed me for 4 days (mushrooms, spinach, manchego and parm cheese) for breakfast, three days worth of southwestern salad with chicken (roast corn, black beans, roasted peppers, chipotle ranch dressing and cheese) and three nights worth of chicken breast baked in a harissa/brown sugar sauce, roasted green beans and smashed potatoes for dinner.
I've seen "meal prep" that makes things for 5 days in advance, but that seems like that food has been sitting round too long I think 3 days is the max really for salad and maybe 4 days for cooked meals. Thoughts?
It depends on the foods and if you're freezing them. Salads last the least amount of time, especially dressed, and some ingredients will wilt much faster than others. Keeping them cold and well covered helps some and keeping the dressing aside if there is any helps more. I find using good plastic wrap and poking a few air holes in it works best for raw produce. Cooked entrees, like chicken in sauce, should be fine for 5 days as long as you reheat it to a high enough temperature. Same with potatoes: cover well, keep cold or better, frozen. Frozen stuff can last a long time and be fine and you can be less picky about reheating.
Somewhere you can find a chart of shelf life for various proteins and use it as a loose guide if you want. Or if you really get into it, you can prepare ingredients like diced onions, sauces frozen into ice cubes, and so on, and cook at the last minute. It's very quick if all the time-consuming prep is done.
Usually 4 days for me but it depends on the food and just how hungry/tired I am. I've done chicken that I cooked 6 days before and been fine but it depends on how fresh it was to begin with.
For salad I keep the ingredients separate and just toss together that morning to bring into work, seems that the lettuce holds up better that way, separate container for the dressing but that's only if it's to go.
For chicken, I have cooked a batch & lived off of it for about 4 or 5 days. The only salad I would keep in the fridge, already dressed, would be a grain salad, or a potato salad. Green salads or fruit salads, I make fresh at meal time, but I often will have the fruit chopped up & ready to go.
Remember where humans came from as far as the history of food preservation. Mankind could preserve food for long journeys. With modern refrigeration, freezers, and food handling, food, when properly wrapped can easily last 4+ days.
We often do meal prep on Sundays. If making something like lasagna or stuffed shells, we make an extra meals worth and freeze it, uncooked. We may make a soup, stew or braised dish to have a few days later as it tastes better then. We might prepare mise en place for a meal later in the week. we tend to stay away from prepping salads ahead. We also tend to spread more complicated dishes prep over a couple days as most can be prepped to a certain point and refrigerated.
Nowadays instead of using plastic containers for fridge storage, I put cooked proteins into good plastic storage bags and squeeze all the air out before sealing. I keep cooked chicken like that for up to 5 days, when there is nothing else in bag (no sauces or veggies). I sort my pre-cooked stuff and keep proteins separate from sauces (usually I make the sauce or condiment at last minute). Often sauces have dairy or hidden sugars in them that will go bad faster than the protein.
There's a big difference between what is appetizing (wilted salad after a couple days) versus spoiled. I regularly keep proteins as well as vegetarian dishes refrigerated for a week. Maybe it helps that my refrigerator is kept at 34 degrees and I'm certain to use clean serving spoons dishing out from the container. I've never had any issues - 3 days seems extremely conservative. You can always freeze stuff but to do so for only a few days seems a huge waste of time taken to unthawing.
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