Ep. 109 - Preserving, Part One: Freezing

This time of the gardening season is likely the time you’re seeing a bounty of goodness coming from your garden, especially if you’re in a climate where the summer heat is starting to wane just a little bit. This usually signals to my garden that it’s time to make one last hard push to reproduce, so the tomatoes and peppers and other summer plants start to push out all kinds of fruit. This is also the time when later planted warm-weather crops start to put on their fruit. I planted my Amish Paste tomatoes late this year purposefully in order to delay the onset of fruit until I would be more prepared to handle preserving.

But that’s not to say there haven’t been periods over the gardening season where I’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of produce coming in the house and my go-to method for preserving during the hottest and busiest time of the garden season is freezing. (This is also a good way to preserve a bounty that you find at the farmers market unexpectedly and maybe you don’t have your canning game together yet.) Freezing is like the entry level way to preserving your harvest because it’s the easiest, it can be done in very small batches, and it doesn’t require anything in the way of special equipment.

There are pros and cons to every preservation method and freezing is no exception, but if you need a way to put something up quickly and easily, you really can’t go wrong here. Today we’ll review the basics of freezing, what you’ll need to freeze produce successfully, the reason behind blanching and which veggies can maybe skip the hot water bath, and more. Let’s dig in.

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RESOURCES:

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Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving

National Center for Home Food Preservation (uga.edu)

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