Can you freeze cooked fish

Smoked salmon, for example, is generally good for up to a week in the refrigerator. If you like to nibble light meals in the summertime, when it's too hot to enjoy cooking, you might also want to look into a Spanish tradition called escabeche. In the days before refrigeration, it's how devout diners in that country dealt with the requirement to avoid meats during religious fasts.

To make escabeche, you combine oil, wine, vinegar and spices to make an acidic marinade. Next you choose your fish and brown it in a skillet, then add the marinade and let them simmer for a few minutes. Pull the skillet from the burner and let the fish portions cool in the marinade, then refrigerate it for up to a week. The acidity of the vinegar keeps bacterial growth at bay, and the flavors of the spices will continue to mellow and deepen during that time. Serve the escabeche chilled or at room temperature, as an appetizer or as part of a larger cold plate.

If you've cooked up more fish than you care to eat in the span of a few days, your best option for long-term storage is your freezer.

Instead of three or four days, this keeps the fish fresh and usable for three or four months. Your fish must be packaged as airtight as you can get it, in freezer bags with the excess air squeezed out, or in containers with plastic wrap pressed right to the surface of the food. Food stays food safe indefinitely in the freezer, so the few months' limit is mostly about flavor. Here, again, oxygen will cause the taste of the fish to deteriorate until it reaches a point where you'd have to be pretty desperate to actually eat it.

If you own a vacuum sealer, which extracts almost all of the air from a package, it's the best way to prepare your fish for the freezer. Seal the bags then place it in the freezer.

The water protects your fish from freezer burns while keeping air away from it. Or, you can place your fish directly to an empty ziplock bag. Cooked fish and other seafood can be safely stored in the refrigerator 3 to 4 days. Refrigeration slows but does not prevent bacterial growth. According to the USDA, cooked salmon leftovers should be eaten within three to four days.

However, you can technically store the leftovers for up to seven days tops, although you will be compromising both taste and safety. By opening the packaging when thawing the vacuum packaged fish, oxygen is present and the spores will not produce the vegetative cells that produce the toxin.

Listeria monocytogenes is a bacterium that can contaminate food. While most chefs advocate for making them fresh, mashed potatoes can be made ahead and frozen until ready to use. Follow these tips and tricks to ensure that your mashed potatoes maintain their texture and flavor once frozen and reheated.

Other useful 0. When you add the flour-coated chicken to the pan, make sure it is skin-side. In most cases, sausages are breaded beforehand.

To find out if reheated cooked salmon could be just as good as freshly cooked salmon, assistant food editor and Test Kitchen wiz Kat Boytsova slow-roasted three salmon fillets and served them to me in a blind tasting.

All three versions were plated identically, but just by looking I could tell the way in which each piece of fish had been prepared. The freshly cooked salmon was beautifully pink, moist, and plump. The piece that had been thawed and reheated was a bit paler and the flaky fish looked ever so slightly more compact. The final piece—the one that was reheated from frozen—was practically ashen.

It had taken on a grayish hue and I could tell that Kat had attempted to wipe away the albumen that white, viscous liquid that oozes from the pores of overcooking fish.

The flavor of each piece followed suit. The freshly cooked salmon was tender and delicate; the thawed and then heated salmon was fine but a bit tacky, causing my teeth to stick together slightly with each bite—a sign that too much moisture had been released.