How to freeze food
My next newbie freezing
question was "How do I freeze food?" With pesto, tomatoes,
applesauce, and a few other things, freezing is as simple as throwing
the food in a bag and putting it in the freezer. But you'll want
to blanch most vegetables prior to freezing.
Blanching consists of cooking the food for a couple of minutes, long
enough to denature the enzymes so that the vegetables will stop aging
and will be preserved in the instant of summer freshness. I
prefer to blanch in a steamer, although you can put your veggies
directly in boiling water if you'd rather (though you'll lose flavor
and
nutrients!)
After blanching, you need to
cool the food as quickly as
possible. Most folks submerge their vegetables in a basin of ice
water, but we have limited drinking water and ice, so instead I just
lay the vegetables out on cookie sheets and place them in the fridge's
freezer for a few minutes before putting them in their freezing
container. Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy to get a
rhythm going where you always have two cookie sheets of vegetables
cooling while you're steaming a third set.
Blanching time varies by type of vegetable. This
site has a list of blanching times for most vegetables. Keep
in mind that if you're cooking the vegetables into a sauce, soup, etc.,
you won't need to blanch.
| This post is part of our Introduction to Farm Freezing lunchtime
series. Read all of the entries: |
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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