Cooking in bulk saves us time and money, and it means there’s always something decent to put on the table …

Someone who has made a career out of cooking now and saving for later is Suzanne Mulholland, also known as ‘The Batch Lady’ (visit her website here). It’s fair to say Suzanne has turned cooking in bulk into an art form.  With a huge internet fan base and a cookbook to boot, she’s riding the crest of the bulk cooking wave.

Suzanne can cook forty meals in an hour, and can make ten different meals from a handful of ingredients, using just a spoon! The cover of her book has a simple message: ‘Grab and Cook.’ Her recipes are versatile and can be cooked immediately or made for the freezer, allowing for convenient meal options when we’re short on time.

We can all learn from Suzanne’s success, showing how popular bulk cooking is. If we embrace her approach, we’ll save money and gain more time.

We don’t all need to take it as far as Suzanne, but her success shows how popular cooking in bulk is. So what are the steps to taking back control of our time in the kitchen and the money in our pocket?

Plan Our Shop

Cooking in bulk starts with good meal planning. In her book, ‘The Batch Lady Meal Planner’, Suzanne suggests making a weekly menu. This menu should include all meals and snacks to help us shop better. Use websites like mysupermarketcompare.co.uk to check prices and buy seasonal fruits and vegetables.

The book also gives easy templates to make shopping lists by category. This way, we can save money and buy only what we need. Planning meals that use the same ingredients can also help us eat well and stay within budget.

Things like stews, curries and pasta sauces are cheap and easy to stretch out, and they freeze well too. Home cooked food almost always has less fat and salt in it, so it’s much better for our health, too.

Buy in Bulk (if possible)

Generally, the cost of food goes down as the size and weight goes up. For example, 500 grams of minced beef will cost more per gram than 1,000 grams. So, if we’ve got the storage space and the cash, consider buying bigger at the supermarket. Another knock-on benefit of buying in bulk is it usually means less packaging, which is good for the environment.

Save Time

It doesn’t matter if we live on our own or have a big family, cooking in bulk saves us so much time. Scaling up a recipe to make ten portions instead of two might take a few more minutes in prep time, but if it takes an hour to make 10 portions, compared to 45 minutes to make two, we’ve saved nearly three hours. Plus, our energy bills will come down as we are using less.

Freeze and Label

Now we’ve done the hard work, and cooked a big batch of tasty grub, we just need to pop it into a freezable container and label it. Most meals can be frozen for up to six months, so it’s important to write a date on it to know how long it’s been in there. When we’re ready to eat it, simply reheat in the microwave or on the hob. Remember to follow reheating guidelines.

Top Tips

There are a few things we can bear in mind to really bring down our food costs.

• Veg is cheaper than meat, so go veggie for a couple of meals and save some cash
• Cooking in batches saves us time and money
• Bulk out meals with the cheaper stuff
• Dishes based around rice, pasta or couscous go a long way
• Don’t forget about nutrition – again, veg is cheap, so try and get as much as possible

Image: Rimma Bondarenko / Shutterstock 

_{Last Updated September 2024}