Blanching Basics
Whether you have an abundance of a particular thing in your garden - or if there's a great deal at the grocery store, blanching and freezing is a quick, easy and healthy way to store excess produce.
We put a lot of effort into our gardens, and it is great to have fresh produce in summer and fall, but when we preserve and store excess produce, we get to enjoy the fruits of our labor all year long.
One easy and effective way to preserve things is blanching and freezing. The process is simple: the vegetables are immersed in boiling water for a few minutes, then immersed in cold water, then they are frozen. When this is done properly, they will keep for up to a year and retain a good deal of their color, flavor, texture and nutritional qualities. This is because when blanching, just enough heat is applied to kill off anything in the vegetables that might cause decomposition, but when the vegetables are immersed in cold water, the cooking process stops, so they are just barely cooked.
I mainly use blanching and freezing for things that compress into cakes like kale, spinach, and swiss chard; and for things that need to stay loose like peas, beans, broccoli bits, brussels sprouts, etc.. Here's how I do it:
Things that compress into cakes
Fill a large pot with enough water to completely cover and immerse whatever is being blanched, add a teaspoon of salt, and place it on high heat to boil.
Wash and rinse leafy greens, cut if needed (I usually don’t bother1). If stems are heavy, I remove them and set aside for soup stock.
When the water is boiling rapidly, add the greens and place a lid on top.
Multiple batches may be necessary. If that is the case, there’s no need to dump the water, it can be reused a few times - and even though the water darkens a bit with each batch, it’s not big deal, don’t worry about it. While the pot is heating back up, fill a sink or large bowl with cold water.
When steam begins to escape the lids (after a minute or two), remove the greens with a slotted spoon/tongs/spider strainer, and transfer them to the cold water to arrest the cooking process.
A “spider strainer” is a must-have for blanching. They are easy to find on Amazon, and any good Asian grocery store should have them as well. Transfer the greens to a colander and shake out all the water. Then pack them tightly into a plastic container.
Place the container in the freezer, and leave it there overnight. The next day, pop out the “cake” and place it in a freezer bag. Keep adding cakes to the freezer bag until it’s full.
Remove the cakes from the freezer and use them as you would fresh kale. You will find that that flavor and texture are excellent.
Things that need to stay loose
For things like beans, etc., the process is the same as above, right up until step 6.
Once the beans/etc. have cooled - transfer to a colander, shake out excess water, and then spread them out on a cookie sheet.
Place the cookie sheet in the freezer over night. The next day, remove the hard frozen beans/etc., transfer to a freezer bag, and place in the freezer. Keep adding until the bag is full. Stored in this way, they will not clump and freeze together, so you can take out as much or as little as you need when cooking.
Doesn’t blanching remove important nutrients?
The tables below show the nutritional components of raw and cooked kale (as an example). While I did a much deeper dive on this topic in a previous article, it can be seen in the “/100g” column on the far right, that per 100g, many of the numbers are similar (e.g. fat, fiber, sugars, protein, phosphorus) and in the case of those lowered by being cooked, (e.g. vitamin C, Iron, calcium, potassium), they are only roughly halved, and this is easily compensated for by eating more, which tends to happen when they are cooked because they lose volume and are easier to digest. This is further borne out by by the “Amount” column, because the tables compare a cup of cooked (118g) vs a cup of raw (21g) - so by eating more cooked kale, one can actually get more vitamins. So the vitamin thing is really not a meaningful thing. These are number for cooked kale - when it is blanched, there are even fewer losses due to the shorter cooking time.
Final Thoughts
It is important to remember that, despite the abundance of summer and fall, winter is right around the corner. For that matter, there isn’t much to harvest in spring either, so it makes sense to set aside as much a possible when the garden is bountiful. This can be a chore at the height of the growing season when there are so many other things to do, but it will all be worth it later on, when the soil is frozen and the grocery bills start to increase - for as many of us learned as children from Aesop’s fables, it is important to prepare for winter even when the days are warm and the living is easy.
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Here’s a video where I show how to blanch greens:
Here’s a video where I show how to blanch peas:
I just cut it when I plant to cook it. By freezing it whole, it stays together better when defrosting - which I usually do by immersing the frozen greens in a bowl or sink of cold water - or leaving it on the counter in the morning before I head off to work.