A long time ago when I was a young boy, if I put too much
on my plate but couldn’t finish it all, my parents or grandparents would turn
to me and say, “Your eyes were too big for your stomach, huh?” When the green bean harvest is coming in
strong, there’s no way to eat them as fast as you pick ‘em. And you don’t want to do that anyway. If you do it right, you can enjoy the best of
both worlds – you can enjoy ‘just-picked’ green beans right out of the garden
AND you can do like a squirrel and sock some away for later months when it is
either too hot or too cold to grow them.
But you want to store them right. Mushy dark green beans aren’t very
appetizing. We blanch our beans and then
when we pull them out of the freezer, it is really hard to tell by color,
taste, or texture that they are not fresh.
Here’s how we do it:
First we wash them and snap off both ends of the
bean. We don’t snap them into smaller
segments. We leave them whole, but
that’s just our preference.
Let's Blanch Some Green Beans... |
While I’m washing and snapping, I get a big pot of water
boiling. Once it reaches a rolling boil,
I drop in the first batch of beans. I
try to guesstimate about the amount that will fit in a quart-sized freezer
bag. The water will stop boiling and I
continue to watch it closely. As soon as
it reaches a boil again, I set the kitchen timer for three (3) minutes.
Set the timer for 3 minutes |
During that three minute period, I wash the sink down,
fill it halfway with cold water and add ice.
When the alarm goes off, telling me that the beans have boiled for three
minutes, I QUICKLY pull them out of the water and dunk them in the icy-cold
water. The point of the exercise is to
immediately halt the cooking process.
Cool them down quickly! |
Then, of course I start another batch blanching. Blanching inactivates the enzymes that are
present in vegetables that mature the vegetable or fruit. Blanching will allow you to freeze the green
beans while maintaining their color, texture, and flavor. The color of the beans are just beautiful.
Beautifully colored |
I drain them and them pack them tightly into quart-sized
freezer bags, label them with crop and date and then arrange them in the
freezer. In January when the sky is grey
and temperatures are frigid, we can walk to the deep-freeze and pull out a bag
of ‘fresh-picked’ green beans to enjoy.
4 quarts of fresh green beans ready for the deep freeze |
One gallon frozen and (hopefully) many more to go. I’m thinking about pickling some green beans
and also canning a few as well.
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