Nine things to buy, and one appliance to think about

Version 1 built the system. This one answers the only question standing between it and a cooked Sunday: what do I actually buy. Every size below is derived from the thirteen dishes in v1, not from a general list of good kitchen things. Then the harder purchase, a second freezer for an Israeli apartment, with the criteria that matter here and the models that meet them.

The kit, sized from thirteen real dishes

Bags alone will not do it, which is the natural assumption and the wrong one. Three shapes of food come out of a cook session and each needs a different container. Pourable things go in flat bags. Complete single meals go in boxes that can reach a microwave without being re-plated. Exact repeated portions go in trays that pop out as cubes.

What not to buy

• A vacuum sealer. It is the obvious upgrade and it is wrong here. At this volume it adds minutes per bag on the one day that is already tight, and the air-removal problem is solved by pressing a zip bag flat.
• Souper Cubes by name. The brand does not ship to Israel. It is a silicone tray with portion markings; any silicone tray is the same mechanism at a fraction of the price.
• A matching storage set. Buy the shapes the food needs, in the counts above. A coordinated set is a decision made before knowing what gets frozen, which is the decision this whole system exists to avoid.

Most of it is the ten glass boxes. Plastic halves that number and costs you the oven route. Treat the figure as an estimate: Israeli container prices were the one thing the research behind v1 could not confirm on a live page, and an unconfirmed number is worth saying so rather than rounding confidently.

The second freezer, and why not yet

A two-shelf fridge freezer holds somewhere around 80 to 150 litres and most of that is already spoken for by ice cream, frozen vegetables and bread. A week of batch cooking for five does not fit beside that, and two weeks certainly does not. So a second freezer is coming. The discipline is to buy it second, not first.

Three criteria do all the filtering

Climate class, which is the Israeli-specific one. A freezer is rated for an ambient temperature band, and on a covered balcony in August that band is the whole question. SN-T means rated from 10 to 43 degrees. A unit that does not publish its class is not automatically unsuitable, but it is unverified, and the label on the box is the only place to settle it.

Drawers, not shelves. The entire point is that a nine-year-old opens it, sees a labeled bag, and takes it. Drawers let the freezer be zoned the way the inventory list is zoned. This is also why a chest freezer loses here despite costing less per litre: it is one deep well and everything lives under everything else.

Footprint, which is where the real trade-off hides. Not height. Depth.

Prices read on live retailer pages on 13 September 2026, mostly bug.co.il, one on citydeal and one on zap. Three further models appeared as search results only and are left out of this table rather than listed on a snippet.

The 220 buys 43 more litres for 134 more shekels, which reads like a bargain until you look at the depth: 70.9 cm against 57.5, and 5.7 cm wider. That is 60 by 81 cm of balcony against 54 by 68, for a freezer that is already larger than the measured need. On a balcony the binding constraint is floor, not money. It is also the one listing whose own product text says five drawers in one line and six compartments in another, which is exactly the kind of detail nobody checks before delivery day. Take the 220 only if the two-week measurement says the smaller one would have overflowed.

The Premier at 162 litres and ₪1,199 is manual defrost, which means a recurring chore this whole system exists to eliminate, and it publishes no climate class. The Luxor at 206 litres and ₪1,790 is No Frost with six drawers and the shallowest cabinet in the table at 54.7 cm, which makes it the interesting one, but it also publishes no climate class and its energy label is on the Israeli scale rather than the EU scale, so it cannot be compared like for like. Either becomes a real candidate the moment someone reads the climate class off the box in the shop. That is a five-second check nobody does.

If the balcony is tight

Beko FNE1075N, 75 litres, ₪1,277, 54 by 59 cm and only 84 cm tall, so it fits under a counter or in a corner. It is also the only model here with a published annual energy figure: 181 kWh a year, about ₪115 at the current household tariff of 63.52 agorot per kilowatt-hour. The catch is two drawers and a shelf, which is not enough zoning for five people eating from it, and 75 litres will not carry two weeks. It is a real answer to a small balcony, not a smaller version of the right answer.

What is not settled

• Net capacity is published for one model out of seven. Every other litre figure here is the gross number on the listing. No Frost costs volume to insulation and the fan, and the one model that states both loses about five percent.
• Annual energy is unpublished for both larger Bekos. The 220 litre listing gives a daily lab figure at 16 degrees, which is not an annual label and was not converted into one. A number that looks comparable and is not is worse than no number.
• No manufacturer states its own clearance. The 10 cm behind the unit used in the footprint figures above is a general guideline, not a figure from any of these brands.
• No Israeli source says a covered balcony voids the warranty for any of these brands. It also does not say it does not. Ask at the point of sale and get the answer attached to the order.
• Delivery pricing is indicative. One retail group's policy, reached through a search result because the policy page itself blocks fetching: free to a third floor, roughly ₪30 to 80 per floor above that, about ₪60 to remove a door for access. Confirm at checkout, for your building.
• One major retailer blocked every attempt to read it. Electra, Whirlpool and Nakasumi models are therefore absent from the table rather than present with guessed specs.