What Is IQF Food?

What is IQF Food?

In the culinary arts, the term IQF stands for "individually quick frozen." IQF foods are notable for the fact that each individual piece of food is frozen separately from all the others. For example, a bag of IQF peas doesn't simply contain a solid block of frozen peas; rather, each of the individually frozen peas is loose inside the bag, making them much easier to work with.

What Foods Are IQF?

Common examples of IQF foods are fruits like blueberries, strawberries, and peaches; vegetables like corn, peas, and green beans; seafood like shrimp and scallops; or poultry, like individual chicken breasts. Even whole poultry, such as frozen turkeys, are processed using the IQF method.

Also called flash-freezing, the IQF method involves sending the individual food items on a sort of conveyor belt into a blast chiller that freezes the item very quickly. Because the food items are separate when they go in, they stay separate after they've been frozen.