Is Batch Cooking a Good Fit for Your Lifestyle?
With our hectic lifestyles, it is challenging to find the time and energy to cook every day. And this reflects in our healthy and general energy levels. Enter batch cooking — a revolutionary approach to meal prep that enables you to have nutritious meals every day.
Batch cooking requires you to prepare meals for a whole week in one go. Here, you pick 2–4 recipes, purchase ingredients in bulk and cook large batches of food. You then refrigerate or freeze them to reheat during mealtimes and have warm home-cooked meals even on busy mornings and spent evenings.
This way, you save time and money and live a more organized healthy life. No wonder, batch cooking is popular among busy individuals, working parents and students. However, it has its disadvantages so much that it has failed many people. So, it is a must that you learn about the benefits and disadvantages of batch cooking before choosing it as your way of maintaining a fresh, delicious and healthy diet.
Benefits of Batch Cooking
When you cook food, you take charge of your nutrition. Batch cooking gives you that power while saving both time and money. It offers convenience by giving you the ability to cook in one go without having to worry about filling your fridge with leftovers that would be thrown away sooner or later.
It lets you eat healthily by allowing you to cook at home despite a busy lifestyle. With batch cooking, you can plan and manage your nutrition for the whole week in one go.
It saves time by organizing your meals. Now you don’t have to decide what to eat, chop vegetables and marinate proteins for 1–2 servings only to realize that you are missing an essential ingredient. Just do the dirty work in one go and save time.
It reduces stress around eating. Once you start batch cooking, you don’t have to answer the dreaded question of “What to eat?” or brace yourself for cooking after a long workday. Just take food out of the fridge and heat it.
It reduces food wastage and saves shelf space. Batch cooking involves picking recipes, portioning and purchasing the ingredients accordingly. So, say goodbye to overstocked pantries, wasted space and spoilt food.
It saves money, in the long run, owing to less frequent take-outs and less wastage. Batch cooking also allows you to purchase ingredients in bulk using store discounts, thus saving more.
It can be as fun as you want. Now that you have a designated time to cook, how about making it a family day? Divide work, grab some snacks, banter and enjoy tea in the garden while food cooks.
It is the way towards sustainability. When cooking food in batches, you order less frequent take-outs and waste less. Thus, you are a step ahead on the path of sustainability.
Disadvantages of Batch Cooking
While batch cooking is beneficial for busy people, it is not for everyone.
It requires you to take about half a day out each week to plan, purchase ingredients and cook food. Many a time, it takes one whole day just to chop, and prep the meals, which might be unviable.
It doesn’t allow you the variety that you would expect from a meal-prepping system. Many recipes do not do well with precooking and storing and that might include a few of your favorite staples.
It is the recipe for monotony. While batch cooking is a great way to simplify meals, it requires you to eat the same food over and over again till eating itself becomes a chore.
It is tough and requires good care. From picking ingredients that handle heat and cold well to thawing meals before reheating; batch cooking needs you to do everything right. It is a long way before you get the hang of it.
It leads to health problems when food goes bad due to repeated cooling and reheating. There have been several reported cases of food poisoning among even the most experienced batch cookers.
It fails at its primary goal; that is to provide nutritional tasty food every day as nutrients deplete with time.
It requires a large initial investment in cooking utensils and storage vessels. Also, quite a lot of food gets wasted while you learn how to batch cook. These combinedly add to your monthly expenses.
A Better Alternative to Batch Cooking
Meal planning and prepping with a variety of ingredients
Meal planning and prepping with a variety of ingredients allows flexibility, variety and spontaneity in meal choices. Instead of being limited to a set of batch-cooked meals, you can use different ingredients and cook more frequent dishes throughout the week. This reduces food waste as you can use ingredients before they go bad, which can be a common problem with batch cooking. Moreover, it is more enjoyable and satisfying to cook and eat a fresh meal rather than reheating leftovers.
What Is the Best Way to Cook More Frequent Meals?
You can cook more frequent meals with the help of Nymble. It automates the entire cooking process so all you have to do is load the prepped ingredients and let Nymble prepare you a meal while you go about your day as usual. So, once your meal prep routine is set, you just have to load ingredients into your cooking robot and in no more than 40 minutes, your meal will be hot and ready!
Moreover, Nymble aids meal planning by giving you access to 500+ ready-to-eat recipes, spanning every cuisine and diet. It lets you filter recipes based on preferences, diet, calories, and ingredients of choice, or even study detailed nutritional information for every recipe you cook. This gives you the gift of time which you can use to focus on more pressing responsibilities.
Summing Up
Planning and preparing meals regularly can be overwhelming whether you’re an experienced cook or just starting. It is difficult to balance work, family and healthy eating at the same time so you need to organize it.
Like all other cooking methods, batch cooking has its pros and cons. It has proved to be a healthy option for several households by saving them time and energy. However, the limited options and repetition of meals become monotonous and unenjoyable. So, it is necessary that you consider your lifestyle, dietary preferences and eating habits before committing to batch cooking. And two weeks into it, if you find yourself unwilling to eat cooked food and are tempted to order take-outs, batch cooking might not be for you. So, it is better to weigh both sides evenly and consider other options before deciding on a system that suits you.
Here’s what Nymble users have to say about their private chefs:
To learn more about our nifty robot chef, visit here. You may also sign up for a virtual or an in-person demo to watch Nymble in action and taste some robot-cooked goodness.
