How to batch cook for the week: a beginner's guide

Batch cooking has an image problem. Search for it and you'll find photos of 20 identical plastic tubs and someone who has apparently given up their entire Sunday. You don't need any of that. Cooking two dinners in bulk, once a week, is enough to take three or four evenings off your plate.

This guide covers what to cook, how to fit it into about two hours, and the UK food safety rules that matter when food sits in the fridge or freezer.

What is batch cooking?

Batch cooking means making a big quantity of a dish in one go and eating it across several meals, either over the next couple of days or from the freezer. It's different from meal planning (deciding what you'll eat) and from meal prep in the broader sense (chopping, marinating and portioning). It fits neatly inside a weekly plan: two batch-cooked dinners can cover four nights.

Which dinners batch cook well?

The rule of thumb: if it has a sauce, it probably batches well. If it's meant to be crispy, it probably doesn't.

• Great: chilli, bolognese, curries, stews, casseroles, soups, dal, pulled meats, meatballs in sauce.
• Good, with care: pasta bakes and lasagne (freeze before the final bake), pies (freeze the filling), cooked grains (rice especially needs care, see below).
• Skip: anything fried or crispy, dressed salads, dishes with lots of fresh herbs added at the end, most fish (it dries out when reheated).

Start with recipes you already cook and like. A batch of something nobody enjoys is just a freezer full of guilt.

A two-hour batch cooking session

This plan makes a big chilli and a big curry: roughly eight to twelve portions between them.

1. 0:00 Chop all the onions, garlic and peppers for both recipes at once. Start browning the mince for the chilli.
2. 0:20 Get the chilli simmering. Start the curry base in a second pan.
3. 0:45 Both pans simmering. Wash up and get tubs and labels ready.
4. 1:15 Chilli and curry done. Take them off the heat and spread them into wide, shallow containers to cool faster.
5. 1:30–2:00 Portion up. Fridge what you'll eat in the next two days, freeze the rest.

Food safety: cooling, storing, freezing and reheating

This is the bit that matters most, so it's worth getting right. The UK Food Standards Agency's guidance on chilling, freezing and defrosting food says:

• Cool it quickly. Cool cooked food and get it in the fridge within one to two hours. Splitting it into smaller, shallower portions speeds this up.
• Keep your fridge cold. Between 0 and 5°C.
• Eat fridge portions within 48 hours, or freeze them if you won't get to them.
• Freeze as soon as possible, and label everything with what it is and when you made it.
• Defrost in the fridge, not on the worktop, and use the food within 24 hours of it fully defrosting.
• Reheat only once. Take out the portion you need rather than reheating the whole batch.

Rice needs extra care. The FSA's home food fact checker advises cooling cooked rice as quickly as possible, ideally within an hour, keeping it in the fridge for no more than 24 hours, and reheating it only once, until steaming hot all the way through. If that feels like a faff, cook rice fresh on the night and only batch the curry.

Fitting batch cooking into your week

Batch cooking works best when it's part of the plan, not an extra job. A simple pattern:

• Sunday: cook the chilli and the curry. Eat the curry fresh.
• Monday: chilli from the fridge.
• Wednesday and Thursday: something quick and fresh.
• Following week: two freezer portions on your busiest nights.

After a few weeks you'll have a freezer stash of four or five different dinners, which is the real payoff: nights when you can't face cooking don't turn into takeaways. WRAP estimates that food bought but not eaten costs a family of four around £1,000 a year, and portioning and freezing what you'd otherwise forget about cuts into that directly.

Our weekly meal plan template has space to mark which nights are batch-cooked or from the freezer.

Batch cooking with DinnerSorted

I make DinnerSorted, so I'm biased, but this is how I use it. Save your batch version of the recipe (any imported recipe can be edited, so you can double the quantities once and keep it that way), put it on Sunday, and its ingredients go onto a grocery list combined with everything else you're cooking that week. Cook Mode keeps your phone screen on and moves through the steps when you say "next", which helps when you've got two pans going.

The planner, grocery list and Cook Mode are free. You can type recipes in or import them from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and websites, with three free imports a month and unlimited imports on DinnerSorted Pro. iPhone only for now.