Times are weird, but packing my freezer full of goodies in anticipation of weirder days to come is one of the few things I feel empowered to do right now. Frozen food — coupled with friendly, no-nonsense heating instructions — can be especially handy when you don’t have two brain cells to rub together in-between work, keeping your family safe and staying sane. But that doesn’t mean it’s gotta be all pizza bagels and Lean Cuisine all the time.
Right now, as many restaurants have shifted to sell more shelf-stable items in addition to prepared dishes, it’s possible to pick up restaurant-quality frozen food from your favorite spots. It’s generally cheaper than getting it hot, and you can have it ready to go whenever you need it. The highest compliment for frozen food is the eater’s inability to tell that the food was a micro-glacier just an hour before dinner, and the dishes on this list capture that seemingly magical sense of freshness.
Here are 10 of the tastiest frozen food offerings that I’ve found around the Bay Area, including plump Georgian khinkali, comforting Greek pastitsio and indulgently porky Taiwanese rice dumplings. My freezer is full enough for TWO minor apocalypses.
Yes, it’s true: You can make wood-fired pizza with your janky rental oven. Del Popolo’s new line of frozen sourdough pizzas are prebaked in the restaurant’s centerpiece oven, ensuring charred, bubbly crusts no matter what you’re working with at home. In just six minutes — as much time as it takes to pop corn — you’ll have chewy and tangy Neapolitan pizzas ready to enhance your movie night. My favorite is the Yukon gold potato pizza, a white pie with mozzarella and fontina cheeses. Fried rosemary adds a refreshing touch of bitterness to the creamy toppings. The restaurant’s frozen pizzas, including a variety pack of four types, are also available to ship nationwide.
Del Popolo. 5-9 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. 855 Bush St., San Francisco. 415-589-7940 or www.delpopolosf.com
Lots of Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area sell frozen dumplings, but Dumpling Alley’s are my favorite. For $10 to $11 (depending on the flavor), you get 20 handmade plump dumplings in a ziplock bag. The fillings are simple, ranging from ground pork with juicy kernels of sweet corn to a savory mix of garlic chives, scrambled egg and chewy black fungus. They’re easy to cook up; if you can boil water, you can make these. Pair with a mixture of spicy chile crisp oil, soy sauce and vinegar.
Dumpling Alley. 11:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. 2512 Clement St., San Francisco. 415-753-9617
Pork belly zongzi from Eng’s Zongzi in Mountain View.
Sold out of a humble storefront by the Eng family in Mountain View, these zongzi are honkin’ big and beautifully wrapped, making them perfect for a road lunch. Glutinous rice is soaked in soy sauce and wrapped around fillings of mushrooms, peanuts, bean paste or other savory ingredients; the whole package is bound in bamboo leaves tied with elastic string. When I stopped by, they only had frozen pork belly zongzi available, though I suppose you could easily buy any of them cold and freeze them on your own. To heat, steam the bundles for at least 25 minutes. (You can thaw them first to make the process faster.) The fat from the pork belly melts into the rice, making each bite glisten with flavor.
Eng’s Zongzi. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Thursday-Sunday. 855 West El Camino Real, Mountain View. 650-397-5957.
This family-run bakery specializes in Greek pastries like the shredded-phyllo kataifi, spanakópita and sweet cheese-filled bougátsa, but you can also special-order savory comfort-food dishes. Available in single-serving, family-size or party-size portions, Glyká’s moussaka and pastitsio are soothing and creamy casseroles. The former features layers of sliced eggplant and seasoned ground beef, and the latter is like a Greek-style Bolognese pasta. Both are topped with a layer of bechamel sauce that crisps as it bakes. Fresh out of the oven, they each have the warming properties of a downy angora wool scarf, the kind of comfort food that will lull you to sleep after the last bite.
Glyká Sweets. 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday and weekends by appointment. 1201 Anderson Dr., Suite I, San Rafael. 415-454-4054 or www.glykasweets.com
A caprese empanada from Javi’s Cooking spills its guts.
At this cute bakery near the Interstate 580 overpass, Javier “Javi” Sandes and his crew make 15 varieties of sweet and savory Argentinian empanadas, each of their crimped edges monogrammed with the proprietor’s nickname and the pastry’s filling type. While you can grab them hot and fresh, you can also pick up $18 four-packs of frozen pastries, as well as packs of house-made chorizo and steaks. There are so many that it’s hard to choose, but some safe bets are the carne, a hearty, traditional version with ground beef, hard-boiled egg and green olives; the delightfully Hot Pocket-like jamon with ham and mozzarella and fontina cheeses; and the very Italian-inspired and healthy-tasting acelga, with Swiss chard, ricotta and caramelized onion. If you don’t pull them out right when they’re ready, the cheesy ones will explode in the oven and the resulting dairy lava will crisp up on your sheetpan, though maybe that’s a plus depending on your perspective. You can buy an 8-ounce jar of Javi’s grassy and sharp chimichurri sauce to complete your feast.
Javi’s Cooking. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. 3446 Market St., Oakland. 510-250-9498 or www.javiscooking.com
Frozen lumpia, stacked like firewood in gallon-size ziplock bags, are a common sight in Filipino freezers, so it makes sense that Oakland’s Lumpia Company is in on it. The walk-up lumpia spot offers all of its base varieties — from bacon cheeseburger to pork and shrimp — frozen in resealable bags. They are $24 for a dozen, while a squeeze bottle of sauce is $5; for the sake of comparison, an order of four cooked pieces is $11 to $13. Frying takes just four to five minutes, and it’s easy to cook the lumpia in small batches in a cast iron pan. Shanghai lumpia with pork and shrimp is a good traditional option, but the TLC Veggie lumpia is the best of the selection: texturally rich, it contains fluffy strips of potato, kale, garlic and jerky-like button mushrooms, which give each roll a complicated inner landscape.
The Lumpia Company. 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday; 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 4-8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. 372 24th St., Oakland. 510-835-5885 or http://thelumpiacompany.com/
I was shocked to read the directions for Mister Jiu’s purple pot stickers, which came in a tight, vacuum-sealed bag. Who defrosts frozen dumplings first? But I put my faith in Brandon Jew and let the bag sit in my fridge for a day before I cooked them. Unlike other frozen pot stickers, his don’t require any water to cook: Simply toss in a frying pan and sear the bottoms until hot and browned. To my delight, they came out plump and fresh-tasting, as if they’d been folded just minutes before cooking. Their gingery pork mixture had a generous amount of fat in it, making each bite pleasantly soft.
Mister Jiu’s. 3-8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. 28 Waverly Place, San Francisco. 415-857-9688 or http://misterjius.com/
Pot Pie Paradise & Deli
In a low-key industrial office park in Hayward, Theresia Gunawan and her crew put out a jaw-dropping variety of pot pies, like Aussie Steak with roast beef, tomatoes and green peas; Creole-style chicken and shrimp gumbo; vegetarian three-bean chili with cheddar; and spicy Javanese tempeh with tamarind and ginger. Basically, if it can fit in a double-crust pastry, they sell it. But don’t think that this place relies on gimmicks to get by: As expected from a pot pie specialist, Gunawan’s crusts are flaky and rich with butter; her fillings, well-balanced and packed with tender, bite-size proteins and vegetables. Her most normcore pie, the American-style chicken, nevertheless impresses with a luxurious white roux and juicy chunks of free-range chicken. Both family-size (10 inches) and individual-size (5 inches) pies are available frozen or fresh.
Pot Pie Paradise & Deli. 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday. 3522 Arden Road, Hayward. 510-781-4994 or www.potpieparadise.com
At this new Georgian restaurant in San Carlos, you can pick up bags full of frozen handmade khinkali (10 for $26), stuffed with beef, lamb, potato or mushroom fillings. Mushroom is pleasantly woodsy, like walking through a forest and smelling wild herbs as they crunch under your feet. Lamb, on the other hand, has a robust, gamey flavor and a rich, salty broth. Cooking the khinkali takes some finesse: Gently stir the dumplings in simmering water for 15 to 20 minutes, adding cold water to the pot if it starts to bubble up. If you let the water rip, or fail to stir, the wrappers will tear and the insides will spill out, ruining the batch. Baby them, and you’ll be rewarded with xiaolongbao’s big-boned Western cousin, so hefty with broth and filling that you’ll have to eat them upside-down.
Tamari. 11 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. 1152 San Carlos Ave., San Carlos. 650-232-7877 or http://mytamari.com
Reportedly based on a recipe passed down by the Memon people of modern-day Pakistan, the small chicken samosas ($22 for 10) at Zareen’s are heavy with spice and stuffed with minced chicken. Their paper-thin wrappers are different from typical samosas, which are somewhat doughier; these are more similar to lumpia wrappers. Naturally, they fry up wonderfully from frozen, though baking works just as well. They don’t come with directions when you pick them up at the Indian-Pakistani restaurant’s Palo Alto branch, but they’re simple enough to cook, especially if you plan to bake them. Just throw them into a 350-degree oven while you put together a daal and get your rice steaming; take them out when they start to brown. Zareen’s other frozen items, like the garlicky chicken kheema ($13.95), are very easy to plop out of a container and heat up in a pot.
Zareen’s. Lunch and dinner daily. 365 S. California Ave., Palo Alto. 650-600-8438 or www.zareensrestaurant.com
Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic. Email: soleil@sfchronicle.com
Since 2019, Soleil Ho has been The Chronicle's Restaurant Critic, spearheading Bay Area restaurant recommendations through the flagship Top Restaurants series. Ho also writes features and cultural commentary, specializing in the ways that our food reflects the way we live. Their essay on pandemic fine dining domes was featured in the 2021 Best American Food Writing anthology. Ho also hosts The Chronicle's food podcast, Extra Spicy, and has a weekly newsletter called Bite Curious. Previously, Ho worked as a freelance food and pop culture writer, as a podcast producer on the Racist Sandwich, and as a restaurant chef. Illustration courtesy of Wendy Xu.