Use Old Egg Cartons To Organize Your Freezer In A Pinch

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Picture this: It's Thursday night, and you just made your famous spaghetti sauce. The recipe is family-sized, but you're a family of just two. What do you do with all those leftovers? Or, let's say, you head to the grocery store to buy herbs for a new dish, all the while wishing you just had some herbs saved in your freezer so you didn't have to leave the house. There's an easy solution to these and other cooking dilemmas. You can fill empty egg cartons with small portions of food and stow them neatly away on the shelves in your freezer.

Whether you need to save some pasta sauce or some herbs in oil, this hack is an easy way to waste less and organize your freezer better. The idea takes a leaf from one of the brilliant ways to repurpose ice cube trays in the house: using them for frozen food storage. Of course, if you're using your ice cube trays for their intended purpose, you won't have any available for storing food. Egg cartons are an excellent alternative. Before you go filling your spare cartons with all those delicious leftovers, you need to make sure you're working with the right storage product.

In most cases, egg cartons made of plastic are the best choice for freezing food since they're waterproof and durable. Save as many of these cartons as you can. However, cardboard or styrofoam egg cartons can work in certain circumstances — if, for example, you fill Elsjoy Lidded Condiment Containers with food and pop them in the cups of a cardboard carton, or cool hot liquids (like bacon grease) before adding them to a Styrofoam carton. In other words, don't throw out old egg cartons without trying this genius DIY first!

Before using egg cartons for freezing food, you need to clean them. Use a quality detergent and warm water, then let them dry completely before disinfecting them with 3% to 5% hydrogen peroxide. Rinse the egg cartons in fresh water again, then cut off the lid for more compact storage. Now, it's time to fill the cups! If you're saving liquids, such as sauces or soups, leave a little space at the top of the cup to accommodate expansion. Some other great items to freeze in egg cartons include dips (like salsa and hummus), tomato paste, crushed garlic, and stewed fruit. You can also fill each cup with individual foodstuffs, such as meatballs, falafel, mini quiches, balls of cookie dough, and bliss balls. Plastic egg cartons even make a good substitute for ice cube trays in a pinch!

Cover the carton with plastic wrap or put it in a large resealable bag. Once the food is frozen, you can keep it in the carton or remove the cubes and pop them into a smaller resealable bag that takes up less space. You can get a 200-pack of Choice Marts Leak-Proof Freezer Bags in assorted sizes for about $22. Label and date your carton or bags of cubes for easy reference. If you want to freeze items in small containers to store in a paper or Styrofoam carton, look for containers around 1½ to 2 inches in diameter to match the cup size of standard egg cartons. Pair this egg carton trick with freezer organization tools you have in your home office, like bundling freezer bags together with binder clips or storing flat frozen items upright in magazine files, and you'll never lose leftovers to rot or freezer burn again.