Is frozen food a fad or the future for home cooking?

After a study found frozen vegetables contain more vitamin C than many of the fresh alternatives, Vince Graff decided to eat only frozen food for a week. But was the new diet a cool alternative? Read Vince's account here...
You wouldn’t call me a fashionable chap as far as food’s concerned. I generally catch up with trends at the point that they’re not quite new enough to be cutting edge but not yet old enough to be amusingly ‘retro’.
I discovered rocket when everyone else had moved onto radicchio. I still consider sea bass a bit experimental. And I used to think that lollo rosso was the lead singer of Status Quo.
But this time I’m ahead of the curve. I’ve been following an eating plan that’s just beginning to take off. It is, you might say, totally cool.
Did I say cool? Actually, it’s completely frozen.

Vince Graff prepares a meal with some of his frozen food

I have just spent a week eating frozen food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Why? Because freezer food, for so long seen as unhealthy and unappealing (sickly cheesecakes and manky fish) is enjoying a sales boom - and a new image as a veritable wonderfood.
Last year sales increased by 4.2 per cent, to a total of £4.7 billion; the frozen vegetable market is growing even faster, with a 6.4 per cent rise.
It’s a trend that’s likely to continue if shoppers take heed of the Prime Minister’s recent demand that we waste less food. (Frozen food doesn’t go off, so it doesn’t end up in the bin nearly as often as its fresh equivalent). Frozen is also often cheaper.
But most importantly, there are good health reasons for switching to frozen; it can contain much higher levels of vitamins than ‘fresh’ food.
A study published last month in the journal Food Chemistry found that frozen spinach and green beans, for instance, contain more vitamin C than the fresh equivalent stored in a fridge for just two days.
And some ‘fresh’ produce, such as apples and pears, can have been picked weeks, even months, before it appears in the shops, making it less nutritious than frozen.
‘Frozen food is good quality food,’ says dietician Sue Baic, of the British Dietetic Association.
‘The antioxidants that protect against cancer and heart disease are often contained in the colour of fruit and veg. You’ve only got to look at a piece of week-old spinach in your fridge to see what’s been lost. But frozen veg retains its colour well.’
For these reasons, I’ve agreed to live for a week eating only frozen food. Will I really be able to eat healthily - and more importantly, will it make any difference to the way I feel?
Day one
The tiny freezer compartment of my fridge has room only for a few ice trays, so I’m forced to hire a separate freezer. I am now officially a Grown Up.
I head off to Iceland; in the window there are garish posters for frozen strawberry cheesecake and salt and pepper beef kebabs - very worrying. I’m not allowed any frozen ready-meals, which are usually high in fat and salt. Instead, I’ll have to cook proper meals from scratch using ingredients bought frozen.
But inside things start to look up. There is plenty of unmolested frozen fish, for example - I buy king prawns, smoked haddock fillets, salmon fillets, sole fillets and a packet of white fish fillets.
The prices are incredibly low - the haddock, for example, is 90p per piece, half the price of a piece of fresh at Tesco.
A half leg of lamb is £5, and a beef joint for four people is also £5 (around a third of the price I’d pay at my local butcher, although I bet he doesn’t ship his in from Germany).
How can it be so cheap? My wholesaler friend tells me it’s partly sourcing, but also economies of scale - if your product doesn’t go off during transit or in the factory, you can process huge amounts, which drives down the cost.
More expensive - and more exotic - at Budgen’s, I buy two packets of delicious looking green-lipped mussels (£3.99 each), two pieces of red snapper (£4) and some cod (£5.99).
But before I defrost a single morsel, I weigh myself - 9st 12lb - and have a blood test. The test checks my levels of free radicals - free-radical damage can be the precursor to diseases such as cancer, heart disease and Parkinson’s, and the best way to counter it is with vitamins such as A, C and E. So a diet rich in vitamins should produce lower levels of free radicals.
My results are good - will my frozen food diet make any difference?
Then I make my first frozen meal: smoked haddock, cooked from frozen, poached in milk. To go with it, I cheated with Bird’s Eye Original Vegetable Rice (a combination of rice, peas, mushrooms and onion) as I couldn’t find any plain frozen rice.
Slapping a rigid piece of fish in the pan doesn’t have quite the same appeal as the ‘phwat’ of wet fish, but it tastes just as good. That’s because it’s been frozen so soon after catching that it’s almost like eating it straight from the net.
The rice, however - a ready meal - is too salty. A 180g serving contains 1.3g of salt - more than a fifth of my daily recommended maximum.
A non-meat eating friend is coming for dinner tonight, so I bake some pollock in a parmesan crust.
The fish packet amuses me; it has the precise date the fish was frozen (three weeks ago) and gives a ‘use by’ date - a whole year away. Not much chance of food waste on this regimen. And even if I say so myself, the finished dish is wonderful.
But the frozen strawberries for pudding are disappointing; some are inedible - their ends are brown, possibly because of a fungal infection, I later discover. What’s the point of freezing fruit to preserve its freshness if it’s not fresh to start with?
Day two
Breakfast is a smoothie made with (defrosted) frozen melon, grape and kiwi - both exotic and virtuous, it’s got real a-peel. Sorry.
Lunch is with my parents. Mum has a frozen free-range chicken, but I have to bring the frozen veg - parsnips, roast potatoes and carrots.
The chicken is delicious. The parsnips are crispy and yummy. The potatoes are greasy and sweet.
But - yuk! - who invented frozen carrots? More nasty brown ends. Another fungal infection - it’s clearly catching. Even the non-brown ones taste slimy and bland.
Then I have pudding - apple pie. Well, part of it. ‘There’s frozen pastry on the pie,’ says Mum.
After such a feast, dinner later is a snack. Frozen Quorn burger with frozen diced onions. I count my fruit and vegetable portions. I’ve eaten my five daily servings - for the first time in weeks.
Day three
Breakfast is a smoothie (with defrosted frozen berries), what else? Lunch is a fish finger sandwich - a friend suggests my affair with the freezer is turning me into a chav; I think it’s because everything comes in packets.
To counter this, dinner is a traditional roast, every single item of which was frozen: a whole joint of beef, accompanied by parsnips, roast potatoes, cauliflower, Yorkshire puddings. There are even frozen onions in the gravy.
Of course, this takes a little foresight. You can’t cook a beef joint from frozen: I had to remember to take it out of the freezer first thing this morning. But I can’t get over the fact that the joint was so cheap. And it tasted good, and carved beautifully - nothing like the shoe leather I’d expected of frozen meat.
There was just the nagging thought at the back of my mind that food this cheap shouldn’t taste so good...
Day four

Vincent found buying frozen food in Iceland cheaper and sometimes healthier than the fresh alternatives

A smoothie - eating the same breakfast is getting rather boring (is this how it is in prison?).
Sue Baic says that 85 per cent of people are missing the five a day fruit and vegetable target - ‘it’s so much easier to reach it when you realise that frozen food counts.
Because frozen food is “flash” frozen very quickly after it’s harvested, the water-soluble vitamins such as folic acid and vitamin C are preserved.’
How is this done? In a big hurry. ‘First, the vegetables are blanched - partially cooked quickly to destroy the enzymes and so preserve the quality and colour better,’ says Colin Wright, head of agriculture at Bird’s Eye.
‘Then the food is frozen quickly so that big ice crystals don’t form, which would damage the texture. Our peas go into the freezing tunnel at 17c and they come out at -18c . And the whole process takes less than three minutes.’
He adds: ‘It’s very important that they’re frozen individually.’ This stops the peas from clumping together (if you see that in a supermarket, it’s a sure sign that the product has been allowed to partially thaw and then been refrozen - affecting the texture and quality).
Lunch is beef sandwiches from last night’s leftovers. Dinner is home-cooked moules mariniere. I knew that those green-lipped mussels would be good, and they were. And I bake a rhubarb crumble - with frozen rhubarb, of course.
Day five
Having forgotten to defrost the fruit, I whiz it into a frozen smoothie and it comes out like ice cream. A bit rich for breakfast, so I can’t eat it all. This means that for the first time this week I’m hungry by 11am.
Lunch: a poached salmon fillet, which is revolting, dried out and stiff. It seems that the biggest drawback of packaged frozen foods is that very often you cannot see the quality of the product inside. Though, so far, this is the first piece of meat or fish that has disappointed me.
Dinner: baked cod. Without really noticing, I’m eating much more fish.
This week I’ve been steering away from frozen meat a little (joints aside) as many meat products (burgers, steaks, lamb chops etc) don’t look appetising when they’re cold and rigid.
This reduction in red meat - and the big increase in the amount of vegetables - means I am definitely eating more healthily than usual.
And the more I eat frozen Brussels sprouts, the more I realise I like them. My daily smoothie means that my fruit intake has gone up, too.
I often feel tired during the day - but have not done so once this week. We often feel better when we eat better, explains dietician Sue Baic.
Day six
Breakfast: smoothie. Lunch: prawn stir fry. Perfectly edible but probably not the best meal to cook using frozen ingredients: the water in the frozen vegetables cools down the wok and dilutes the oil, so the food does not come out quite as crisp as it should.

Dinner: roast leg of frozen lamb. Again, I am amazed by the value for money; it feeds four people and cost just a fiver.
My wife says it doesn’t taste as good as the fresh stuff, although it is still tasty, but it’s difficult to know how much of our reaction is conditioned by the knowledge that this lamb was so incredibly cheap. I don’t think we’d notice the difference in a blind taste test.
Day seven
Nearly there! One more smoothie. A few more fish fingers. And for my final frozen dinner some simply grilled red snapper. And, yes, bags of frozen veg.

My verdict...

Incredibly, despite the fact  I’m still splashing around the butter and other dairy in my cooking, I’ve lost 2lb. This may not seem like a huge amount, but remember, I’m only a small chap.
The extra vegetables have clearly crowded out some of the more fattening foods from my diet, and if I stuck to this, within a year, I’d have disappeared completely.
But my free radical count has gone up slightly - there are more whizzing round my bloodstream. Does this mean the extra nutrients in my diet  made no difference? I’m told it’s more likely to be down to the three glasses of wine I had last night (oops).
Otherwise I feel pretty good. I’ve slept well this week and I’m full of energy.
Costwise I’ve spent around the same weekly amount - £115 - but I still have loads of food left over. (I could pretty much eat for another two weeks without going shopping again.)
Will I stick to my frozen regimen? No, because I missed the sensual pleasure of cooking with 'real' food. But for convenience, and in the knowledge that it’s an easy way to boost my vitamin intake, I’ll be mixing and matching fresh much more with frozen.