We knocked another one off the list last night, getting our leeks preserved for the winter! We do love our leeks and find them useful to grow, in addition to growing typical onions.
If you’re not super familiar with leeks, we’d describe them as somewhat like green onions, but with a little bit less bite than your typical onion might have. If you’re ever aiming for a “light onion flavor” then leeks are your go to. They’re great for soups, stocks, pizzas, pastas, soufflé and countless other things. A very classic recipe to start with is the age-old Leek & Potato soup, which is a delicious fall and winter favorite around here.
Again, we use our standard blanch and freeze preservation technique for our leeks. You can preserve either whole or sliced leeks, the only thing that changes is the blanching time. Some years we’ll do them whole, some years we slice them. It’s really just a matter of how we intend to use them.
But, this does allow us to show you how we can easily move our blanching efforts inside if the weather demands it. It was raining pretty hard when it was time to apply heat, so indoors was the natural choice. The process is a little bit slower when you’re using a traditional oven stovetop, at least compared to a powerful outdoor propane burner. We do really prefer the outdoor burner, it definitely shaves time off the process!
Leeks are one of those crops that you can certainly wait harvest after your first frosts, if you need to. They will still grow in fairly cool temperatures, but you’re not going to see night and day differences by letting them go. Leeks grow ever so slowly, typically taking almost 6 months to get to size. (3 months inside, 3 outside for us.) There’s also not any major flavor difference you’ll get from frosts, before or after frost is perfectly fine for harvesting. So, “anytime” in the late season works for us.
We can definitely understand if some growers just prefer to bypass growing leeks. They are definitely a labor of love, having to start them super early and also taking a considerable amount of time. For us, the effort is offset by the fact that they’re pretty much hands off once we transplant. We’ve found leeks to be somewhat obscure at our grocers, so that’s been a good enough reason for us to grow them.
We’re quite happy to have another crop off the to-do list here. We’re excited to use these up over the winter, it’s always a joy to grab a bag here and there for our recipes!
