Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Soup Pucks

These are (some of) my soup pucks. I got the idea off Pinterest, though I can't find the original poster unfortunately. It's a GREAT idea for those of us who want to freeze soup as opposed to canning it. Right now I have a ton of freezer space and my shelf space is rather limited, and so the idea of freezing soup in small pucks made a lot of sense to me.

You make your soup (in this case, home-made minestrone but without pasta 'cause it gets all mushy in the freezer), let it cool, then ladle it into silicon muffin pans. Why silicon, you ask? Because you can turn them inside out and pop the pucks without having to partially melt them to free them from the muffin pan!

My big pot of soup made 9 pucks and 2 full size tupperware style servings. Just put the muffin pan in the freezer and a few hours later you can pop these babies out and store them in a big zip loc baggie with the name and date on it. Now, whenever I feel like having "a can of soup" I can go to the freezer and pull out one or two pucks, pop it in a bowl with a couple of tablespoons of water, and microwave it until it's hot throughout.

I am so much in love with this idea that I'm now thinking this might be the way to get beyond the canned mushroom soup. I use this stuff for my green bean casserole, as a base for pot roast, in other soups, and a zillion other things. It contains a lot of icky stuff that I can't pronounce, and I hate that I'm using a canned soup that I didn't make myself. However, canning (even with as good a pressure canner as we have) mushrooms is not fun, and often backfires. So... Maybe the answer is to make a big batch up, measure it into one cup pucks, and freeze them. Then whenever I'd normally reach for a can, I can grab a puck instead, and avoid the MSG and other non-food additives! Yay me!

2 comments:

  1. What an awesome idea! We usually freeze pesto in ice cube trays (easy to measure out when we want to thaw it -- just grab a cube or three) but I'd never thought to freeze soup in pucks.

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  2. Yes, I've done that, as well as making "iced tea ice" for putting into iced tea in the summer (so it doesn't get watered down), and freezing ice cubes of chicken broth for when you just need 2 tbsp for a recipe. This was a new idea for me, and I really like it. One puck is a bit more than a half cup. I scooped in the "stuff" first (for minestrone, that meant ground beef, beans, veg) and then poured in the broth to fill. They came out very neat looking, as you can see by the photo. I can't wait to try them for lunch sometime!

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