Avoiding food waste - buying cheese in bulk

We go through a lot of shredded cheese, mostly because we get such a good deal on it at Costco. I buy 5 pound bags of both shredded cheese and mozzarella cheese for just over $2 a pound. This is about half as much as I could get it for at the grocery store.


The problem we found with having so much cheese on hand is that it will go bad before we can eat it all if it is just stored in the fridge, and if we put the whole bag in the freezer its a pain to break off pieces of frozen cheese to use when needed.

So I came up with a method for dividing our cheese up so that it can be frozen and then easily thawed in manageable portions. I use plastic wrap and portion out about 2 cups of cheese on each piece of plastic wrap.

Then I wrap up the cheese into little packages and store them in ziplock bags in the freezer.

We keep a small container of cheese in the fridge. When that container is empty, we grab a package of cheese out of the freezer and add it to the container - easy! I've also found that the 2 cup size is about the amount of cheese we use when we make homemade pizza. It takes a few minutes to get all of that cheese packaged up, but it is such a time-saver and money saver, because we never waste cheese any more!