Kitchn Love Letters

This $10 Find Is the Reason I Always Have Homemade Sauce in My Freezer

published Sep 22, 2021
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Credit: Joe Lingeman

I’m a big fan of homemade sauces, be it pesto or a long-simmered tomato sauce. And when I make them, I do so in large batches, as I’m a meal prepper by nature and always an appetite optimist. But when I don’t want the same dinner (or sauce) twice in a three-day stretch, the worst happens: The sauce begins to go bad.

Enter: Prepworks Freezer Pods, the ultimate sauce-saving companion! They’re perfect for liquid foods that are challenging to freeze otherwise, making them ideal for not just sauces, but also soups, stocks, and broths. And while it’s not quite soup season for me (I live on the West Coast!), I’ve been using the freezer pods constantly to store freshly made portions of pesto and tomato sauce.

Credit: Nilina Mason-Campbell

The pods come in lots of sizes, as small as two tablespoons and as large as two cups. I have the 1-cup tray, which has four cup-sized slots (You can always fill them less to suit your needs, though!). When I need sauce, I just reach into my freezer, roll back the tray’s silicone lid, and jimmy out a frozen block. Then, I add the frozen sauce block to a saucepan to thaw or to a skillet along with my already-hot noodles or zoodles, stirring until the sauce warms and coats the pasta. Being able to freeze the sauce in 1-cup portions is way easier than dividing it amongst a regular ol’ ice cube tray or putting it into a container or plastic baggie. And I really love that, with the pods, I have all the convenience of a store-bought sauce with the taste and satisfaction of something homemade.

Since I have been using my freezer pods so much, I now have my eye on getting the 1/2-cup and two-tablespoon trays so that I can freeze even more sauces, but also things like roasted garlic and compound butters. Yes, I see a whole lot of meal prepping (and freezing!) on my horizon — and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Do you have a similar product you love? Tell us about it in the comments!