What is batch cooking, and how to start cooking for the whole week

Batch cooking is cooking several dishes, or the parts of them that take longest, in one session, usually at the weekend, so you can eat from them over the following days. The food is split into portions: the fridge holds the first days’ meals, the freezer the rest, and on weeknights you only reheat, assemble or finish something quick.

It doesn’t mean eating the same thing five days running, or spending all Sunday at the stove. It means trading lots of rushed half-hours in the kitchen for one long, calm one, and getting home on Wednesday knowing dinner already exists. It’s close to what many people call meal prep, but the focus is on cooking in bulk, not on packing identical lunches.

Batch cooking vs cooking every day

Two ways to organise a week of cooking.

	Cooking every day	Batch cooking
When you cook	A little every day, often in a hurry	One long session a week, plus quick finishing touches
What you decide	What’s for dinner, every evening	The week’s menu, once
Shopping	Several trips, sometimes without a list	One big shop from the plan
The dishes	Freshly made, more day-to-day variety	Stews, soups and bases that keep well
Washing up	Every day	One big session, little during the week
The risk	Ordering takeaway or eating the usual again	Getting bored of the same containers

It isn’t all or nothing. Many households batch the slow parts (beans, anything in the oven, a big pot of sauce) and cook fresh what needs to be fresh, like grilled fish or an omelette.

What to batch cook (and what not to)

What works best takes a while to make and keeps well, or even improves, overnight:

• Stews, curries and beans: chilli, a lentil and vegetable curry, a beef stew, a pot of chickpeas for the week.
• Soups: lentil soup, butternut squash soup, a stock that becomes the base for something else.
• Sauces and bases: bolognese, a plain tomato sauce, a curry base. Half a dinner in a jar.
• Cooked protein: a roast chicken to shred, meatballs in sauce, pulled pork.
• Ready vegetables: a tray of roasted vegetables, or veg washed and chopped for a five-minute stir-fry.

What suffers with time: anything fried or breaded, which goes soft; dressed salads; potatoes you plan to freeze, which turn grainy; and homemade mayonnaise, which is best made on the day.

Who it suits

• Households where nobody has time on weekdays, or everyone gets home late and hungry.
• People who take lunch to work and are tired of improvising it the night before.
• Families on different schedules: each person reheats a portion when they get in.
• Anyone who wants more beans and vegetables and fewer ready meals.

It suits you less if you enjoy cooking every evening, if your plans change a lot, or if your fridge and freezer are already full, because the logistics of the containers become a project of their own.

How to start: plan the week first, then cook once

1. Plan the week before you turn on the hob. Decide which meals you’ll eat at home and which dish goes in each. If you’ve never done it, the guide on how to plan a weekly menu as a family walks through it step by step.
2. Pick two or three dishes, not seven. The first session needs to go well, not cover everything.
3. Shop once, from the plan, with everything each dish needs.
4. Order the session by time: start what takes longest (the pot of beans, the oven), and chop and prepare the rest while it cooks.
5. Portion everything, and decide there and then what goes in the fridge and what goes in the freezer.

An example: on Sunday, a chilli, a butternut squash soup and a roast chicken. Monday comes from the fridge: chilli with rice, soup for lunch, the chicken shredded into wraps. Everything else goes straight into the freezer on Sunday, and each portion moves to the fridge the night before.

How to store batch cooking: cool, portion, label, freeze

The storing is half the session, so plan time for it. A big pot left on the hob all evening, or one huge tub in the fridge, undoes the work. What a home cook can do every time:

• Let it cool before it goes in the fridge, and don’t leave it out all evening either: a pot cools much faster once it’s split up.
• Divide it into small, shallow containers or freezer bags, one meal each, so it cools quickly and you only open what you’ll eat.
• Use containers with lids, and keep cooked food apart from raw meat and fish.
• Label every one with the dish and the day it was cooked. Masking tape and a marker are enough.
• Fridge for the first days, freezer for the rest. Decide it on Sunday, not on Wednesday when you open the tub.
• Defrost in the fridge overnight, not on the worktop.
• Reheat until it’s piping hot all the way through, stir halfway, and reheat each portion once.
• When in doubt, throw it out. A portion you can’t date isn’t worth the risk.

In practice: everything that isn’t for the first days goes into the freezer on Sunday, labelled and dated, so you don’t end up with unidentified frozen objects in March.

How far ahead can you batch cook?

As far ahead as your freezer has room for. The fridge covers the start of the week; what you’ll eat later goes into the freezer the same day it’s cooked, and moves back to the fridge the night before its turn. That’s why the plan matters: if you know Thursday is the curry, Wednesday night is when it comes out.

Start with one session for the working week. If it works, a second, smaller one midweek (twenty minutes for a fresh sauce or a tray of roast vegetables) keeps things from tasting of Sunday by Friday. Freeze in the portions you’ll actually use, a dinner for four or a single lunch, so nothing gets defrosted twice. And freeze some for the weeks with no session at all: a few portions of chilli in the freezer are the best plan B there is.

Cook once, decide once

Batch cooking isn’t about cooking more; it’s about deciding earlier. The Sunday session is the visible part, but what really saves time is having chosen the week’s menu, because without it the big pot ends up being a pot of chilli nobody had in mind for Friday.

Batch cooking with Wenu

Wenu doesn’t cook for you or know what’s in your freezer: it handles the step before, the menu. In the calendar you can put the same dish in several meals, Monday’s chilli and Tuesday’s, and mark the gaps the session doesn’t cover as “Eating out” or “Improvise”. The Recipes tab keeps your dishes with their ingredients, and you can sort it by least recently planned, so the same three stews don’t take over. On Free, you type the shopping list yourself.

With Pro, the shopping list fills itself with the ingredients of what you’ve planned, and everyone at home sees the same menu, live, so whoever gets home first knows which container to reheat.