Blanching & Freezing the Snap Bean Harvest

Way back on May 4th, we showed you our first harvest of green beans.  You might recall that, in truly goofy fashion, I spelled out the bean varieties with beans on the trampoline.  We harvested some Irish Potatoes, too.  Perhaps I'll post about the potato pickin' in a few days.  There are few things that go better together than fresh picked snap beans, new potatoes and butter.  We've eaten our share of those in the last several weeks.

When you have a bountiful harvest of bushels of beans, it is important that you process them to save some for later consumption.  We do this quite often.  We like the process of blanching them and then freezing them.  It is a quick, easy, efficient method for putting your beans up while protecting that 'fresh from the field' taste and texture.

So first, you gotta pick 'em.  Backbreaking work when you have several rows to go through, but you get it done because there is a reward at the end of the row.  We bring the buckets of beans in and wash them up.  You want to do this because you do bring in the occasional worm, bug, or snail with the beans, and you want to ensure that they are cleaned up before processing.  The next step is we snap off the ends.  Many people call this step 'stringing the beans,' but these varieties really don't produce much of a string.

Once the washing, snapping and stringing is done, we put them in a big pile.  On the stove, we'll get a pot of water boiling and in the sink, we'll fill with ice water.

When you have water coming to a boil in your pot, simply dump in a batch.  We estimate a batch being approximately a quart of beans.  Once the water has begun boiling once again, set your kitchen timer for 3 minutes.  That's how long it takes to blanch beans.

We pour them into a colander and then put the water back in the pot to get another batch going.  Notice the color of the beans.  They have a nice, healthy, green color.  They are blanched, not cooked.

These beans are still hot and will continue to cook, so you want to quickly pour them into a sink of ice water to abruptly stop the cooking process.

Once the beans are very cold to the touch, you can remove them and package them.  By this time, the next batch has been boiling for 3 minutes and are ready for an ice water bath.  You can have a real assembly line going in your kitchen.  We pack them in quart freezer bags.  We find that this is a nice quantity to pull out of the freezer, thaw and cook for a healthy side dish for any meal.

The next night we blanched and froze a bunch more.  I think so far we've put 12 quarts into the freezer with more coming.  Blanching has several benefits:  It preserves a bright, green color.  It cleans any remaining dirt off the beans.  It stops the enzyme action which would otherwise affect flavor, color, vitamin content and texture.

Last year's green bean crop was less than desirable, but this year looks to be a better crop.