Preserving the Cauliflower Harvest

Gardening can be a funny thing.  Some years, even though you do everything you've always done, the yield is less than desirable.  This year the sweet potato harvest was lackluster, at best.  Some years, though, everything clicks on certain crops.  This year the cauliflower harvest can best be described as a bumper crop.  That term originates from the 19th century when things exceptionally large were termed as "bumper."

Before the big freeze we harvested all the cauliflower as exposing the heads to a deep freeze causes the cauliflower to become mushy and damaged.  We ate all we could, but decided we would need to blanch and freeze the excess so that we could preserve the harvest and eat it throughout the upcoming weeks and months.

Cauliflower grows with large leaves that curl around the head, leaving the head mostly protected.  As a result, the heads are snowball white, clean, with no blemishes or damage.  Tricia and I formed a quick assembly line, cutting off any remaining leaves and stem bottoms.  The upper portions of the stem are tasty and edible. 

We disassemble the heads, cutting them into florets a little larger than a golf ball.  While we are working on this, we get a pot of water boiling.  We also clean the sink and fill with cold water and ice.  We're about ready to get things going.

With the water at a full boil, we drop a batch of cauliflower into the water.  Once the water is boiling, we start the timer for three minutes.  It takes 3 minutes to blanch cauliflower.  Blanching the cauliflower (or any vegetable) does a couple of things: it preserves the color and it preserves the texture prior to freezing.

The beeper goes off, alerting Tricia that it's time to take it out.  I say "alerts Tricia" because I can't hear the beeper.  The timer sounds at a frequency that I cannot hear.  Years of running a crawfish boat with no hearing protection (my fault entirely) have resulted in hearing loss of certain frequencies.  There are worse afflictions, I suppose.  

Once the beeper sounds, we quickly remove the blanched cauliflower into a colander, allowing the hot water to drain out, and then we put the cauliflower into the cold water bath.  We want to immediately stop the cooking process.  To do so, we add more ice to the sink as needed.  Simultaneously, we put another batch of cauliflower florets into the water and start the whole process over again.  Rinse, wash, repeat... Literally.

Once the cauliflower has cooled, we bag it up into quart-sized Ziploc bags and put them into the deep freeze.  We yielded nine bags.

Of course, we did hold back 3 or 4 cauliflower heads to put in the crisper in the fridge and we'll eat that over the next week or so.  We always like to eat as much as we can fresh from the garden, but it's always important to be able to preserve the harvest.