I love to make smoothies with kale or spinach or other greens - but I can't use the stuff fast enough and it spoils. How do I properly freeze fresh greens like these?
Actually you clean it, prep it to your liking, and lay it out on cookie sheets, anything large like that, and put it in the freezer. Once frozen you just stuff it in zip locks. By freezing it on sheets you don't get chunks that never seem to be the right size.
We end up with a stupid amount of produce from the garden every fall and that is the best way to freeze it. It replicates the flash freezing you hear about in commercials.
I put kale in my smoothies all the time. I just wash and prep as normal and throw in a freezer bag.
We grow Swiss chard by the ton. There is no way we could eat it all. It's similar to spinach, so I imagine the prep is the same. We wash the chard well and then prepare it...get rid of woody stems and parts we won't eat. Boil water. Then we add our chard to the boiling water to be blanched. We boil for about two minutes. Then we put it in an ice water bath, this is to prevent it from over cooking....you cool for as long as you boil, about 2 or 3 minutes. Then you put it in a ziplock bag and get out as much air as possible. A vacuum sealer is excellent for this job, if you have one. Package it in portions you use, it's a pain to thaw a whole bag when you'll only use one bag of it. Date it and toss in the freezer. I think they have a shelf life of a year in a deep freeze.
i don't blanche mine because i want all the nutrients that raw greens bring with 'em. i just chop it, rinse it, dry it, and lay it out on baking sheets. once it's frozen, pop it in a freezer bag and voila! green smoothies whenever i want.
:) khairete
S.
I started making green smoothies for my kids over the summer. Literally all I did, was put the washed spinach in a freezer bag and stick it in the freezer. When I wanted to make a smoothie, I just took what I needed out of the bag and threw it in the blender.
I would blanch them first and then put them in a freezer-safe sealable bag, then put the date on them.
I wash, cut and freeze. I would not boil it first in order to keep all of the nutrients.
