How to Freeze Peak Produce

How to Freeze Peak Produce

The summer heat means farmer’s markets, roadside stands, CSAs, backyard gardens, and even the grocery stores are full of the season’s best produce.

If you are blessed with more than you can eat before it spoils, let us teach you how to freeze peak produce.

Our grandmothers spent many hot hours canning seasonal produce, and this can still be a great way to preserve. However, freezing produce is less time consuming than canning, and produce frozen at the peak of freshness maintains its nutritional value better. You may have noticed that we make an effort to include seasonal produce on our monthly plans. This helps keep the price down as fruits and veggies are most affordable in peak season. Luckily, you get the best taste and best nutritional value at peak season too.

So, using our meal plans is a first step for using up extras from your garden, CSA, etc. But sometimes you need a targeted approach. For instance, if you take your kiddos apple picking and end up with a bushel or two, how do you store those? Maybe you score an unbeatable price on several flats of berries that need to be used up quickly. How do you ensure they don’t go to waste? There are a couple of different ways you can go about freezing produce. Be sure to check out our post on What You Can and Cannot Freeze before you get started.

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You’ll be able to:

  • search the 13,500+ freezer recipe database with hundreds of filters available.
  • build and save for later use up to 3 meal plans of 5 recipes each.
  • favorite recipes you find and want to try later or have cooked and love.
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Freeze Peak Produce - Flash Freeze

1. Flash Freeze Individual Items

Flash freezing is the technique we get asked about the most! You can simply prep and freeze your bounty in appropriate portions and use them later to bake or create meals. If you have a large freezer and access to lots of produce, you may never have to visit the frozen food aisle again! This technique works quite well with most produce (think foods you would normally find in the freezer aisle), and even some you wouldn’t expect like tomatoes! With certain items, you may want to be careful to freeze them flat so that you don’t end up with a giant clump of unusable fruit. Check out our post on flash freezing for more details. Just don’t forget to label and date your produce so that you can keep track of what you have.

We have a few posts on individual fruits and veggies for your convenience:

Freeze Peak Produce - Smoothie Bags

2. Prep Items for Easy Meals

Bags of individual items are nice to have, but so are bags that are already mixed and ready to be turned into a quick meal. We focus a lot on freezing full meals around here, but batch cooking can also be a great tool for prepping in bulk items that you use frequently in your kitchen. Think about those quick family favorites or sauces and convenience items that you would rather make from scratch.

Summer Peak Produce

 

3. Freeze Full Meals

Of course, we can’t end this post without talking about turning your produce into delicious full meals that can be pulled from the freezer whenever you need them. Our plans are already centered around seasonal produce (especially the Real Food, Vegetarian, and Paleo meal plans), but with our MenuBuilder system, you can customize any plan to include the produce that you need to use up. You can search for recipes by an ingredient, but make sure you check out the following posts that highlight the best of each season.

 

5 Easy Steps to Defrost a Chest Freezer

Fall Peak Produce

Summer Peak Produce Spring Peak Produce

 

3 Comments

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  1. This article frustrates me. A few weeks ago after going bonkers with vouchers at the farmer’s market, I pulled an all nighter peeling, slicing, blanching, and freezing. The reward for my labor? 8 pounds of rubbery, bendy carrots, chopped onions that turned to much when thawed, and 10 pounds of green beans that lost any and all snap.I expected better than that and don’t know what I did wrong.

    1. Marybeth, I’m sorry for the troubles! My guess is you may have blanched for too long. And you need to put them immediately into an ice water bath to stop the cooking process before freezing. I’ll make a note in this post to prevent this from happening again!

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