And so it begins! Our blanch & freeze effort, which is our hands down favorite food preservation technique!
We have a lot of resources on this subject, which we’ll link down below, but we’ll also describe it briefly. Blanching your foods is the process of briefly boiling your food for a specified period of time, immediately chilling it afterwards and then drying it for further storage such as freezing. The blanching process will arrest the enzymes in your food, which will be the ultimate force in breaking down your foods and causing spoilage. This is an ideal step for most foods prior to freezing as it ensures much longer preservation times, typically up to a year or more. With blanching, we’re not technically cooking our foods, but rather just applying enough heat for a specific amount of time to eliminate that enzyme activity.
A great many of the veggies we grow can be preserved in this manner. However, there is a small list of foods that cannot or require further modification to the process. (And our link goes into that and much more depth.) We love using this technique as it’s primarily geared towards a year’s worth of preservation, getting us all the way to the next year’s garden. It also preserves the original food’s texture much better than other preservation techniques.
With cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli or cauliflower, it’s wise to wash your produce in a lightly salted brine prior to this preservation technique. This helps get any bugs that might be hiding in those crevices out, although we almost never observe that to be a problem. It makes us feel a bit better, anyway.
Once the produce is relatively well dried, we package it up into freezer bags, label them with the harvest year and stuff them in the freezer. We say that it’ll last a year, but technically if it’s kept frozen, it can last indefinitely. There will be very minor degradation of color and taste as time marches on, but much less so than if you don’t first blanch the foods.
Cooking with this kind of food is just like you would with any fresh or frozen vegetable. You can often go straight from the freezer to the cooking process, perhaps slightly increasing your cooking times over fresh produce. We trust this process enough that we even use our frozen produce as side dishes, it’s practically indistinguishable from fresh when cooked. We think frozen food gets am undeserved bad rap, but this process is effectively like creating your own DIY freezer aisle at the grocer.
You can definitely do this process indoors and we have many times. We generally prefer using an outdoor propane burner as it speeds up the process a lot, keeps us outdoors and allows us a bit more room to work with. You might notice that special basket thing, that’s an 8 quart strainer and it saves us a ton of work with fishing out our veggies from the boiling and ice water baths. We put that thing through so much work that our per-use cost is extremely low! But, you can do it with a slotted spoon just as well.
We preserve a lot of food using this method. We find it much easier than many of the alternatives out there, plus we love how well it preserves the freshness and texture of the original foods. We eat this stuff all winter long and it’s one of the major ways we make our garden seriously work for us!
Lastly, we aren’t making this stuff up. We follow the University of Minnesota’s extension service guidelines when we use this technique. Our article promotes those resources and gives you the links to verify it and the safety around it yourself. It’s a technique that really works well for us, given that our freezer’s pretty much run for free in the winter, since we keep them outside!
And as always, if you have any questions, we are pretty much an open book here!
