How long it keeps
Fridge and freezer times for the things a prep week actually contains.
The two numbers that matter
Almost every question about meal prep storage resolves to one of two figures. Cooked dishes hold three to four days in a fridge kept at or below 40°F. Frozen at 0°F they stay safe more or less indefinitely, but they stop being good after two or three months, and that is the number worth planning around.
Safe and good are not the same word. Food poisoning is a question of temperature and time; texture and flavour are a question of ice crystals and oxidation, and those keep working long after the food is technically fine to eat.
By what is in the dish
| What it is | Fridge | Freezer, at good quality | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cooked chicken or turkey | 3 to 4 days | 2 to 6 months | Freezes better in sauce than dry |
| Cooked beef or pork | 3 to 4 days | 2 to 3 months | Slices dry out faster than a braise |
| Cooked fish | 3 days | 1 to 2 months | Reheats badly; better eaten cold |
| Soups and stews | 3 to 4 days | 2 to 3 months | The best thing to freeze, by some distance |
| Cooked rice and grains | 3 to 4 days | 1 to 2 months | Cool fast; rice left warm is the classic mistake |
| Cooked pasta | 3 to 5 days | 1 to 2 months | Freezes better baked in sauce than plain |
| Roast vegetables | 3 to 4 days | Not recommended | Comes back soft; texture is the whole point |
| Cooked beans and lentils | 3 to 5 days | 3 to 6 months | Freeze in their liquid |
| Cut melon and berries | 3 days | Purée only | Citrus goes in its own box |
| Dressed salad | Same day | No | Keep the dressing in a separate bay |
| Overnight oats | 4 to 5 days | No | Better on day two than day one |
| Hard boiled eggs, peeled | 1 week in shell, 2 days peeled | No | Whites go rubbery when frozen |
The two hour rule
Cooked food should not sit between 40°F and 140°F for more than two hours in total, and one hour if the room is above 90°F. That window is cumulative across the whole life of the dish, which is the part people miss: the forty minutes it spent cooling on the counter and the thirty minutes it spent in a bag on the way to work both count.
This is the practical reason for shallow containers. A three inch deep dish of stew passes through the middle of that range in a fraction of the time a deep tub takes, because heat leaves through surface area.
Cooling before the lid goes on
Hot food sealed in a container steams itself. The water that condenses on the underside of the lid drips back into the dish, and that is what makes a reheated meal watery. It also warms everything else in the fridge.
Spread the food out, leave the lid off or resting loose, and give it half an hour. If you need it colder faster, sit the dish in a shallow tray of cold water. Do not put a sealed hot dish straight into a freezer: it will freeze the condensation as a sheet of ice across the top of the food.
Labelling that survives a fortnight
Write the date, not the day. Day names work for a fridge week and are meaningless in a freezer. Masking tape on the lid comes off cleanly; a marker straight on plastic never quite does.
If the food is going to someone else, write the reheating instruction rather than the name of the dish. Somebody opening a freezer three weeks from now needs to know what to do, not what it is called.