Batch cooking for people who hate batch cooking

We have visited a lot of kitchens containing a stack of unused food storage boxes bought in a fit of optimism. Batch cooking is one of the most commonly recommended and most commonly abandoned pieces of advice in home nutrition, and we think the reason is that the usual version of it is genuinely unappealing.

Cooking four identical portions of chilli on a Sunday means committing your Wednesday self to chilli. Your Wednesday self did not agree to this and will order a takeaway out of spite.

Cook components, not meals

The shift that makes this work: instead of making finished dinners, make parts that combine into different dinners. Same time in the kitchen, roughly the same cost, and you keep the ability to decide what you actually want at six o'clock.

Three components cover most of a week.

One savoury base

A large pan of softened onion, garlic, carrot and celery with tinned tomatoes, cooked down properly and seasoned but deliberately left plain. No chilli, no herbs, no decisions made yet.

That base becomes: bolognese with mince; a chilli with a tin of beans and cumin; a shakshuka with eggs cracked in; a soup with stock and lentils; a pasta sauce with cream stirred through; the bottom of a traybake. Six different dinners, one pan, one evening of work.

One tray of roasted vegetables

Whatever is cheap and in the fridge, cut large, oil, salt, hot oven, forty minutes. Roasted vegetables are far better cold than boiled ones, which is the whole point — they go into lunch as they are.

They become: a lunchbox with feta and a squeeze of lemon; a filling for wraps; the vegetables alongside tonight's chicken; blitzed with stock into soup; folded through the grains below.

One pot of grains or pulses

Rice, bulgur, pearl barley, or a pot of chickpeas or lentils. This is the component that turns everything else into a meal, and it is the one most households skip — which is why there is a fridge full of good things and still nothing to eat.

The five-minute version, for weeks when ninety minutes is a fantasy

Some weeks there is no Sunday. The equivalent move is to make the cupboard do the work, so keep it holding a small set of things that combine into a meal with almost no effort: tins and jars of beans, a pouch of cooked grains, tinned fish, tinned tomatoes, frozen peas and spinach, eggs, a jar of harissa or pesto, and good olive oil.

Beans, tinned tomatoes and an egg on top is a dinner in eleven minutes. Tinned sardines, a pouch of grains, lemon and frozen peas is another. Neither requires anything of you on Sunday, and both beat the alternative.

Keeping it safe, briefly

This is the part most batch-cooking articles skip, and it is the only part with real consequences.¹

• Cool it fast. Get food out of the big pot into shallow containers so it cools quickly, and into the fridge within an hour or two rather than leaving it out overnight.
• Two days in the fridge for most cooked things, or freeze it. Label with what and when; a mystery tub gets thrown away.
• Rice needs care. Uncooked rice can carry spores that survive cooking and multiply at room temperature. Cool cooked rice as fast as you can — ideally within an hour — keep it in the fridge no more than a day, and reheat until piping hot, once only.
• Reheat properly. Steaming hot all the way through, not warm in the middle.
• Don't refreeze something that has been frozen and thawed, unless you've cooked it in between.

Why this one sticks

Because it fails gracefully. If you only manage the tray of vegetables, you have still improved four lunches. If the base gets used for spaghetti three times because that is what everyone wanted, fine — it was still one pan. Nothing is wasted by a change of mind, which is the flaw that kills the twelve-identical-containers approach.

And the thing that actually changes a household's eating isn't a better recipe. It's that at 6.15pm on a Wednesday, with nobody's day having gone to plan, there is something in the fridge that is already most of the way to dinner.