Most people are guilty of having old sauce jars hiding at the back of their fridges. Whether it’s home-cooked leftovers, or jarred sauces you bought at the store, it can be frustrating to find that you’ve forgotten about something in your fridge.
While some foods might be okay to eat past their expiration dates, it’s probably for the best to throw things out by the time they’ve started go mouldy.
So what can you do to help prevent food from going bad? Thankfully, one mum has shared her go-to tip for storing pesto and other jarred sauces. The cheap method prevents it from turning before she gets around to using it up.
Taking to her Instagram page, savvy mum Casey Major-Bunce told her 729,000 followers how they can replicate the trick themselves. And apparently, it means you can store pesto for months.
Casey said: “I hate food waste but what I hate even more is faffing around chopping garlic chilli and all those fiddly bits. These little jars are a dream but they only last about five days in the fridge… which is just rude really.”
Casey continued: “This is just a way to save them, just pop them into some parchment paper and freeze them. And you can literally grab and go when needed.”
In the video, she is seen using a spoon to spread out portion sizes of pesto onto a pre-cut square of parchment paper.
She then stacks these on top of each other, sandwiching the pesto or tomato sauce between two pieces of paper. Then, she transfers her stack of papers into a big plastic bag and pops them into the freezer.
Casey added in the caption of her video: “So I cut them up pop them between sheets of baking paper (no fancy techniques here, just slap it down), layer them up and shove them in the freezer.”
A roll of parchment paper costs around £2 – and you only need a small amount to do this method. So it’ll cost you mere pennies to keep your pesto for longer.
Casey added: “They’ll last for six months also that baking paper is also biodegradable so it’s a win win.”
People were amazed by the simple yet effective hack – and several viewers took to the comments section to share their thoughts.
One said: “This is so useful.” Another wrote: “This is amazing! Sometimes I never use all jar in time.”
Someone else also shared their own version of the hack, writing: “I freeze the jar and just spoon out as much as I need. It’s quite easy even when frozen due to the amount of oil in the contents.”
Meanwhile, another person recommended: “Stick in ice cube trays. Saves you using parchment paper and plastic bags.”
