March 22, 2020

What Is Blanching?

By Joseph Parish

Here you are all ready for an exciting afternoon of freezing your excess abundance of fresh vegetable that you have recently picked from your garden. You are in your kitchen and you have gathered all your necessary equipment and supplies required for completing the task at hand.

As you start to do your freezing assignment you quickly recall that most of the vegetables that you will be working with that afternoon will need some sort of blanched prior to being to placing them in your freezer. Sitting down to take a break you ponder just why you would need to blanch these items of produce before freezing them. Let's try and simply that answer the best we can.

All vegetables have various enzyme actions which must be stopped prior to our freezing them for future use. By blanching our fresh foods, we are able to not only stop this action but in addition we are afforded the opportunity to retain the vegetables desirable color, its flavor and the original texture. After determining the why of blanching your mind quickly races to the how involved.

To facilitate blanching of your vegetables you merely need to heat the vegetable slightly in a pot of boiling water. There are several methods which you can employ to blanch your produce. The choice will be up to you and what facilities you have at your disposal. You can employ either water or a steam style blanching. It is important to remember that when blanching your vegetables, they will only remain in the hot, boiling water a short period of time, generally two to seven minutes at best. Blanch them only for enough time to begin the softening process. Now, the key to success lies in the fact that once you have placed them in the water for blanching you will need to remove them from the boiling water and immediately plunge them into an ice filled bowl to stop any further enzyme actions.

Now you are at the point in the process where you can take the vegetables and fill your freezer bags with them to finalize your afternoon of freezing your garden vegetables. You will want to remember that by taking the time to complete this step your final vegetables will retain their flavor longer and present a fresher tasting dish to set on your table. Naturally, blanching times will likely vary from one vegetable to another and should be checked according to the food which you are freezing.

How do you know how long to leave them in the hot water? This is the easiest answer yet. Simply perform a "Google" search to find the average amount of time necessary for blanching a particular vegetable. There you have it in a nutshell the amazing tale concerning the mystery behind blanching.