This Meal Prepper’s “Souper Cube” Freezer Strategy Is Truly Ingenious

As an occasional meal prepper, the one thing I lean most heavily on is my freezer. I might not have time every Sunday to cook for the week ahead, but when I devote some time here and there to filling my freezer with ready-made meals — or even just components of meals like stocks and sauces — it helps keep me on track.

I thought I had it all figured out in terms of how I went about freezing things — that is, until my colleague Lauren came across a brilliant freezer strategy from a fellow meal prepper on Facebook that is completely changing how I deal with stock.

When it comes to freezing liquids like homemade chicken stock and tomato sauce, you have to be careful about the container you store it in. Poured into Mason jars, it could likely end in disaster. Fellow meal prepper Michelle Sendowski came up with an ingenious solution: Freeze the stock in giant ice cube trays. They worked so well, she even began making and selling the trays. She calls them Souper Cubes.

Michelle, along with her husband, Jake, created these freezer trays in March 2018 out of their Los Angeles home. Souper Cubes are essentially large, deep ice cube trays made from silicone. Each cube holds up to a cup of liquid and has four fill lines for easy measuring: 1/2 cup, 1 cup, 125 milliliters, and 250 milliliters. There are four cubes in a tray and each tray comes with a clear tight-fitting lid so you can see exactly what you froze. Oh, and they’re dishwasher-safe.

“Food has always played an integral role in our lives,” says Michelle. “As a small family, we always struggled with how to freeze our leftovers in useful portions. We didn’t want to freeze [things] in glass or plastic bags because we found all those methods wasteful and inefficient. We created Souper Cubes as a way to make freezing and reusing soups, sauces, and curries both easy, convenient, and fun. We use Souper Cubes to freeze everything from steel-cut oats, shakshuka, and broths to spaghetti sauces and even fruit crisps.”

In the past, I’ve frozen stock in freezer-safe plastic pint- or quart-sized containers. They don’t break, but it takes time to get the stock out, and I rarely have the right amount I need for soup or risotto. This solves the problem: The stock is easy to remove, and in amounts that recipes tend to call for.

I also love the idea of using the cubes to store pre-portioned cooked steel-cut oats that I can reheat on the stove or in the microwave with a splash of milk for a quick breakfast. And I have to say Michelle’s suggestion of making fruit crisps in them for an easy dessert is as brilliant as, if not more than, the cubes themselves.