How to Freeze Spinach
Ultimately I’d like to be canning, not freezing, to preserve food. But since I haven’t learned how to do that yet…
We have about 20 spinach plants in the garden right now, more than we can eat (that was the point in planting that many), so I’m going to freeze some. Tonight I started with three plants — this filled 2 gallon plastic freezer bags. I don’t have a kitchen scale but I’m thinking about a pound and a half.
There are two schools of thought on freezing vegetables like spinach. One is that you have to blanch them first. The other is the one I chose to adhere to (less work!)…wash, cut, seal in bags, freeze.
1. cut spinach from the garden
2. wash/rinse it twice
3. spread it to dry for an hour or so
4. cut it into smaller pieces (sort of bite-size once it is cooked down
5. label bags – I included the number of rinses with a reminder to rinse again before cooking, also the date
6. freeze
Since we don’t have a deep freezer (yet!) I plan to eat these within 4-5 months. Supposedly blanching will prolong their “shelf” life in the freezer. In the fall we are re-planting and then I will try canning instead…I’d rather preserve in ways that don’t rely on electricity. Last time we had a prolonged outage people lost thousands of dollars worth of food. Not good…so potentially wasteful in such a fragile infrastructure as ours.
I need to learn how to can, too. I’m used to frozen spinach that is either blanched or fully cooked, so I would probably do that myself, but I like how you did it, too. Do you think it will thaw out just fine?
And your point about power outages is a good one! I have been envisioning our big freezer being full of meat and frozen vegetables. How easy it is to forget about the 3 days we had no power last winter after the ice storm. That makes me think we should get some of our meat smoked so that we wouldn’t lose it all. Although…. if power only goes out in the winter, you can always put frozen food outside.
I think (?) it will thaw OK — it will probably (maybe?) wilt but since we’ll cook it that won’t matter much. For the sake of comparison I harvested about the same amount today and blanched it to freeze. I’m just learning
and will try to remember to post which method is better when I get around to eating from the freezer (might be several months).
It would be awesome to have some meat that is smoked…where/how would you do that I wonder?
I’m not sure about smoking meat. I just know it can be done and then the meat is cooked. Our farmer brought Aidan some smoked bacon. It looked very similar to raw meat, but it was fully cooked. I think you could cook it or warm it up, or just eat it smoked.
I have seen advertisements for smokers in Mother Earth News and I’ve seen people running big smokers outside, but I’m sure those are expensive. Drying meat sounds easy and I saw a plan for a solar dehydrator somewhere (probably Mother Earth News!). That would work for making jerky and probably some other cuts.