Fresh Frozen Recipe and Tips

You can get pretty awesome ingredients as fresh, frozen, and canned options. But the question is, which are best applied to certain dishes today to normal home cooks? I'm going to put that to the test. Tinned, fresh, frozen. Oh, I just remember humans. Three salmon pastries, but one has been made with fresh salmon, one with frozen salmon, and one with tinned salmon. I think I could tell which. Oh, no. Hang on. I was saying I think the difference. I thought I could. These two look very similar. There's a difference in color. Well, because they look similar. I'm saying that's got to be tinned cuz it's smaller chunks.

Do you think I think that could be frozen because it's smaller chunks and it might have mushed. Oh, I'm going to eat the salmon on its own first. Is that the V or the V? That's good question. Okay, that is delicious. Yummy. Beautifully cooked. Nice big flakes. It flakes. Strong salmon flavor coming through. Not too fishy. Delicious. Okay, I think we might have been right. Now, whichever one is the fresh one, that was easy. We just poached the fish.

The frozen one we allowed to defrost before cooking it. And then the tinned one, obviously just opened out the tin and drained it. Ah, big chunky bits. So, lovely texture. Again, subtle salmon flavor. I'd say less strong on the salmon flavor, but still there and still very tasty. I think I prefer that one. I don't know what that means. Try C. There's little in comparison there really. Yeah. That has more of a texture. I would compare to tin tuna.

Yeah. No. Goodness. Slightly drier. Yeah. That is a convenient olive oil. That is convenient olive oil cuz it's really tasty. So you pretty much locked in C. C is almost definitely tinned. No surprise there. It is tinned and it is tinned in oil and actually arguably quite nutritiously sound especially cuz the canning process can soften a lot of the bones. So it can often be even higher in things like calcium than fresh or frozen cuz you're eating mini bones. because you're meeting all those mini bones that are also cooked in the canning process.

I think a is fresh because of the color. Although they're so similar. They're so similar and they're both delicious. I'm going to say fresh. I'm going to say frozen. I think I prefer B. I agree and I prefer it. So, I'm going to say that's fresh. And that's frozen. is fresh salmon, never previously frozen, that we bought from our fish supplier. And we had a conversation just before we started rolling. It's like, we're not going to make this a competition. I should have a point. B is Iceland's four Atlantic salmon fillets, so frozen. And then yeah, as we've said, C is uh the can, so John West Atlantic salmon fillet in olive oil.

Yeah, in situ these it doesn't make a difference. Um again, it comes down to the quality of the fish and the way it's farmed as usual. A good question. Um, but tastewise, experience-wise, doesn't make a difference. No. So, a fresh fish is likely to be firmer because it has undergone that sort of freezing process which softens connective tissues and stuff. Uh, but it depends on where you're using it. So, if you're basically pan frying or grilling or whacking on the barbecue, maybe the fresh fish is your best option. But if you're mixing it into things, whether it's pasta sauces, um, curries, all

sorts of fish, going into all sorts of curries, or meal prep, maybe you're making and putting it through salads and all sorts, then actually, if you're breaking it up, it's probably okay as frozen. If we talk price, that's what I'm interested in, price, cuz that could change. We're going to have to really look at this per kilo to be Yeah. fair across the board. Beth Green fish, £2142 per kilo. the frozen version from Iceland, 21.15 per kilo. So, pretty much the same price Yeah. And the tin salmon, which I would normally associate as being a cheaper option, £30 per kilo. What? A couple of reasons. One, we've done the drained weight, but actually, you're also paying for olive oil in the tin. And olive oil is also quite

expensive right now. You're paying for the convenience. Before that was revealed, I'd have said great, convenient, cheapish, and it's just convenient. The fact that the price difference isn't isn't massive. That's just down to cooking preference or where you want to get your fish from. And you're right, there is a textual difference between fresh and frozen if you're just serving as a piece of fish. Would you like to move for round two? Yes. Round two. We're talking pineapple. M. And they've been put into a pineapple pancake. So cooked into the batter. That is one pancake.

Gotcha. Right. This is going to be amazing. Upside down pineapple pancake basically. Fantastic. I Okay, cool. You've already got Oh, no. I thought I'd tell straight away, but I guess on the bottom a pillow of greatness with lots of that tropical pineapple inside. Okay, look at that. Right. That was great. I've got the texture of pineapple. It's firm, not too mushy. M. Super sweet pineapple. It's almost got a bit of a almost like a I guess it's cooked. I was going to say stewed, but yeah. Now it's really hard to tell.

Moving on to B. What a day. God, this is a good day, isn't it? Wait. Instantly, I think there's a color difference. Massive. Yes. Yeah. Look at that. A is yellowower. pineapple colored. B is pale. Pale and more acidic. Yeah, it's got more of a bite. More a lot more of a bite. I think that works better. Yeah. Overall, because it's offering an acidity to offset the amount of sugar that's in it. Now, tinned pineapple is one of the most common tinned fruit in the UK, but the same kind of logic would

apply to all sorts of fresh, frozen, and tinned fruit. Last one. This is bright yellow, but there's also a lot more water content in it. There was so much water content that cannot escape gravity. Right. Cheers. That's my favorite. very soft. There's so much more moisture in the pineapple and it's kind of like the fibers are still there, but it's just a lot more naughty and intense.

More stewed. Yeah, this is really hard now. That's got more moisture in it. And you got that goo around the batter as well. This one's really hard. Did you expect it to be or do you think it would be easier? I thought it would be obvious. Can I ask a question? Yeah. The tinned pineapple. Is that in a syrup? Yes. Good question. No. In juice. It's also good. That's still a sign. Okay.

Here's my thinking. Sweet. Yeah. And with a bite. Yeah. Acidic with the most bite. Yeah. Juicy. No. No bite. Less flavor. It's not as fresh. I'd say it's doing it's given me what I want from a pineapple cake. Yeah. Does it does the job? So, what do you reckon? Gut feel. Tinned. Fresh. Frozen. Oh, agree or disagree? Frozen. Fresh. Agreed. Tinned. B is indeed fresh. And that is an M&S king pineapple. Uh it's £240 for a whole I know it's not competition, but I can get this back.

A is Dole pineapple chunks in juice out of a tin. We should be doing points. Doesn't matter. And C is M&S's pineapple frozen chunks. Okay. So, it's gone juicy through the defrosting, the freezing and the breaking down of the Yeah. And also I was thinking more moisture. Yeah. Within it. Now, we deliberately chose to put these into pancakes cuz when you're baking with pineapple, if you've got a tried and tested recipe of ratios of flowers and fats and whatever sugars, you need a consistent pineapple to work with that. So,

actually, tinned is often a very safe bet or using a consistent branded frozen pineapple because they're always prepping them at perfect ripeness and freezing them and whatever. Whereas the fresh pineapple better for like fragrant aromomas and the more subtlety and perhaps more crunch. Yeah. But it will vary either way. Three delicious pineapple pancakes. That is a thinker. Isn't it? Very interesting round. It will change. That will change my 100%. Yeah. Right. In that case, should we move on to something savory?

Three delicious bowls of sag cooked down with a number of spices. is onion, ginger, garlic and some dairy fat. So a little bit of butter ghee and cream. Now visually there are differences but can you identify which is which? Green greeny brown. Okay. So we saying be fresh cuz vibrancy. Um also the frozen s keeps the color as well. So it could it's that now it looks pretty I think you can taste canned spinach. I've never really liked it. That's better than my fog. Wow, that's delicious. Oh, that is equal butter as well. Yeah, that's glossy texturally. It's all been cooked down.

It's the point of a saw. I'm going to have to pick up something different. I'm going to have to go to another one to get any reference point. This one looks a lot more appetizing. So in a the spinach is a vehicle for all the spices whereas that tast spinach. Yeah. And actually tastewise it's more bitter. Uh-huh. Mhm. The irony kind of flavor you'd expect of spinach. Yeah. Now for the brown one. Oh wow. Oh my goodness. How can spinach taste so different?

Different. Um right. How do we explain this? In sea, it's suddenly a lot more earthy in flavor. Less bitter, more earthy, but you're still getting a getting more flavor spinach from sea than you are. I agree. It's uh it tastes like a stewed spinach. I feel like there's more moisture in it. It tastes like it's been boiled, if that makes any sense. I think this is the first one we're going to agree on. What do you reckon? Fresh. Frozen. Yeah. Tind. T. Yeah, I'd say that's my favorite. But these two are probably equal. Very different, but equally very Yeah, you're absolutely right in terms of

which is which. Let me show you. Yes. Ball points. We're winning. So, a is Tesco leaf spinach frozen? It's frozen within hours of being harvested. So, is very inverted commas fresh even though it's gone through the freezing process. So, wilted down and frozen as pellets. And of the 900 gram of spinach in the bag, you get almost 900 gram as bit of water comes out of it, but actually mostly it's already wilted down. Fresh is also Tesco. It's Tesco fresh spinach. Uh could be produced Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, Netherlands. Changes through the seasons because you always want those young fresh leaves. You kind of follow the seasons. Um and a lot of it will be grown in indoors as well. And then

finally the tin spinach. That's nattoco produced in France. has got a bit of added salt. Uh but otherwise pretty solid, very consistent product. Every time you open a tin, it's exactly the same. Uh having gone back between A and C. Yeah. There's a big textural difference. That is sogg. Yeah. Sogaloo. Yeah. So it's not there's no aloo in it, but it's so sagg. That's sogg. But tastewise is very nice. It is. You said it kind of quite earthy, quite a depth to it. And like it's been sitting in its own juices. Remember the canning process. It's cooked spinach before it goes in, but then the canning process heating up again.

That's it. It just tastes like it's been cooked. Yeah, that's it. So, it has been quite literally cooked in its own juices. Twice cooked that sagg. The only other thing Kush mentioned in the processing is that when you're using fresh, you've got control. So, you wash it, you wilt it, you've got control of making sure there's no gritty siness in it. Sometimes the other products that's out of your control and you can sometimes find a little bit of the almost grittiness in the tin product.

You swear by frozen spinach and I always think that makes so much sense. I never we know when the weekly shop you never go oh what should we get in the shop this week? You never go spinach. But if you've always got a bag of it in the freezer, you just add it to things for the week. The frozen spinach useful for stirring through I would say almost fresh cooks. So everything from fish pie mix to pasta dishes. Uh put it through soups and broths that just wilt in. Think minestronei, that kind of thing. Fresh also great for salads and dressing things. Whereas the tin spinach really does have to be a long wet cook cuz it kind of already has been.

Yeah. Quite deliberately in this video, we've made sure that the fresh and frozen are the same brand. So we're comparing like for light cuz this is Tesco fresh and Tesco frozen. The frozen works out 178 per kilo. Wow. So, and how much? What's the bag? 900 g. It's about 160 for that bag. And what? It's a 90 g bag. 500 g bag. 500. Oh, you went big. 147 makes it 354 per kilo. So, pretty much twice the price. Yeah. And you don't get twice as much spinach. No. Oh, because then you wilt it down and lose most of it. Finally, the price of the tin. It's 1.95 for that 765 grand tin. So, we are

looking at £3.68 per kilo uh of sort of drained weight. So, it's about the same price as the fresh. It's the only one so far in this video that I won't be buying. Yeah, same. It does a great job and it's shelf stable, but that is also if you've got the freezer space and we are both owners of the chest freezer. You got a chest freezer? It's only a little one. Oh, okay. But it's still Should we have a conversation about round four?

Yeah, let's do it. Chicken. Chicken in a Little Caesar salad. Well, that's definitely the canned. That's definitely turning your nose up, Baz. You'll eat tin tuna. You'll eat tin salmon. I've had beer canned chicken, but not canned chicken. I feel like the moisture has already left my body before I've eaten this. I don't think you'll know with the frozen versus fresh until you've had a chomp. I'm going for it with our imaginary I've got imaginary points to lose. Okay.

Okay, fine. Mhm. Tastes like fresh roasted chicken. Mhm. Yeah. Nothing to say that I can taste of chicken. And it's well cooked. Yeah. Like it's not dry. It's That's a benchmark. That's what I'd hope for. And it gives me exactly what I want from a chicken Caesar. Makes me think that is fresh roasted chicken. Yeah. Breast. That crunched. You sure it wasn't? God underneath. It's falling apart. I can't pick it up.

Oh my. Is this meant for humans? They make tinned sawdust. If I was blindfolded, I would say that's tuna. It's almost got the texture of tuna. I mean, you the fact that you can't fork a segment without it falling apart. So, you reckon it's the fresh frozen or canned? Think it might be the canned? Yeah, the benefit of this particular product and canned is it's ready to go. So unlike the other two, you literally open the can and because it is cooked and stabilized in the canning process, you

can use it in salads and lunch prep and stuff like that. It's it's open and ready to go. Most evenings I get into bed ready to go, but it doesn't mean I go anywhere right now. Okay, back into the game. Ooh. So, you don't think Ca is canned, but do you think it's fresh or frozen? Definitely frozen. Quite definitive. Why? It's the lack of bite of the protein. It almost is pappy, I think, as you chew it. Now, whether it's A or C, the freezing of chicken will do a few things. It will change the muscle structure. uh it will force out some of the moisture content in that freezing which is why sometimes you get ice crystals on the outside of a

frozen chicken breast or fish all the same. The only Yeah. The only thing flavor-wise they're the same. It's purely a texture thing. You're right. This has still has the grain in it. Yeah. Whereas this has all become one texture. So what would you lock in? Fresh. Tin frozen. Correct. Let's have a look. Same situation here. We've got the fresh and the frozen from the same retailer. So these are both from Waitros. A is the Waitro fresh slower reared two chicken breast fillets. B is Villigan's chicken

breast in a tin. It's still chicken breast in water, uh, lightly seasoned, and if you open the tin, it's ready to go. And finally, C is also British chicken, still class A, but it's Waitro's frozen chicken breast fillets. I don't dislike that as much as you do. I don't mind it. It's got a place. I think if it's going into pies or stews or casserles. Yeah, if there's other textures at play and you want chicken flavor, that works. The fresh is 50% more in price than the frozen. So, the fresh is £1250 per kilo and the frozen is about £8 per kilo.

Yeah, it's a lot. Good marinade, good stew. Putting it in curries. I can't dismiss it completely in fairness because I haven't tried it in those stewed or wet applications. I just know when chicken is quite a massive part of the dish, don't have a chicken Caesar salad if you're going to have to use it. I don't mind the idea of having that in the freezer for either last minute or you're cooking for a big crowd potentially. You want to feed people that? Not really, but yeah. And the price of the tinned, this could be big. £25 a kilo. So twice the price of the fresh per kilo.

Why? Canning makes no sense. Now what? Paying for a pretty premium brand. Lots of things put into cans uh across the continent especially more so than we do. Where would you use this if Oh, I wouldn't. Oh, okay. Good. Personally, if I'm going to have chicken, which like you I'm eating a lot less meat full stop. I'd rather have the high welfare quality stuff and pay for it, but eat a lot less of it. Biggest lesson I've learned in today's video is to look at the weights, not just the item. Yeah. In terms of when it comes the fish, canned fish things blow my mind a little bit because we get through so much tin tuna. But I'd always choose to have fresh tune if I could. I mean, I should per kilo.

Yeah, sure. Per tin. You look at it going that tin's only a couple of quid, but that's not You have to times that number by five or six to get the price of per kilo to make a fair comparison. Lessons learned. and drained weight. Yeah. You buy a tin of pineapple, most of it is juice. There's also some pineapple in there. The same with the spinach. The us by yourself after going for a week. Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. First thing in the morning. Yeah. It's when you're skinniest drained weight. On that well-being note, what other ingredients out there exist in both fresh, frozen, and canned form that we could do like for like comparisons?

Comment down below because we love putting these things to test to see when and where each process is worth using. And please give us a like if you found this value. I would give this a like because I found it really valuable. It helps and we want to get 50,000 every video.