A while ago I wrote about how I’d make freezer pucks:
These work ok, but there are a couple issues:
A large batch requires a lot of muffin tins
Cleaning muffin tins is annoying
It can be hard to get them out of the tins
I’ve switched to a different system where I freeze a flat tray in a thin enough layer that I can break it easily:
It takes a bit of practice getting the layer thickness right: generally the higher the water content the thinner it needs to be if you don’t want an awkward block.
I put a layer in a freezer bag:
Before putting in additional layers I put down a scrap of parchment paper or wax paper:
It’s easier and faster than the puck method, though with higher risk of accidentally ending up with a block and needing to defrost some.
Have you ruled out putting the liquid in the bag first, then placing the bag on a baking sheet in the freezer to make the resulting ice block the right shape, then removing your still-clean baking sheet from the freezer?
Then you can pull the bag from the freezer, break off the size of piece you need for a given dish, and stick it back in. If you want the bag contents to be easier to break into precise pieces when frozen, you can place chopsticks under the bag on the tray while it freezes, to make thin spots in the resulting block. And if you use the same size freezer bag for a lot of stuff, keeping the frozen food intact till you’re ready to break some off means you can store the bags in a very space-efficient manner, compared to what would happen if you broke up the food before storing it.
It gets the bag dirtier, but it skips the whole step of re-packaging the food once it’s frozen.
Similar deal with freezing a sandwich bag of something atop an empty ice cube tray. The frozen liquid ends up block shaped enough to be easy to break apart, but you eliminate the steps of removing frozen food from the ice cube tray, packaging the food, and cleaning the tray.
Silicone muffin tins! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VGF8FZ3 is different than mine, but close enough to make the point. For smaller units (condiments and dipping sauces, as opposed to soups and cooking sauces), ice-cube trays work well.
They’re easy to remove, because you just push out from the bottom. And dishwasher-able for cleaning.
Unfortunately I find silicone trays make food taste pretty bad.
This seems to vary a lot by person; asking others they either can’t taste it or don’t mind.
Is the variation by person, or are their different varieties of silicone in use.
Or is silicone hard to remove some flavor molecules from, meaning a new piece of silicone won’t produce bad tastes, but an old piece will.
The second may be true, but there have been a bunch of cases where something baked in silicone tastes terrible to me and other people can’t tell or don’t mind.
I think this is a separate problem: you definitely read poorly talking about that, but for me it’s bad even with completely fresh silicone cookware.
Seems like a hammer & chisel would solve the block problem easily.
Usually ends up making a lot of mess as frozen chips fly all over the counter, then quickly melt.