As a quick follow up to yesterday’s post about fresh fruit popsicles, I thought I might take a moment and share a little tip on freezing these yummy summer fruits before they’re gone. Freezing your own fresh fruit is usually a much cheaper alternative to purchasing frozen – and it means you can eat all of those sweet berries and stone fruits out of season without purchasing them out of season (which means they travel thousands of miles and aren’t nearly as good).
Our summer fruit is dwindling down in our weekly CSA box but favorites have been cantaloupe, watermelon, blueberries, strawberries and peaches. We’ve been using those to make cantaloupe & basil fruit blends, summer tarts (or galettes), layered popsicles, smoothies or just eating them in the raw on a warm afternoon.
Freezing fruit so you don’t end up with a gobble-gook of a mess goes something like this…
1. Chop fruit into evenly sized pieces and place in a single layer on wax or parchment paper. Cover with another piece of wax/parchment paper and add another single layer of fruit. Stack as high as you wish.
2. Freeze for a few hours.
3. Now that each piece of fruit is individually frozen, shake your layered paper into freezer ziplock baggies.
4. Put back into the freezer for another day!
And when you’re ready to enjoy, your individually frozen bite-sized fruit pieces will be ready and waiting (no sledgehammer to separate fruit ice blocks required. usually).
PS More recipes and good eats ideas found here.
Freezing fruit is awesome! I just bought a masticating juicer. If you feed frozen fruit through it, it comes out like ice cream or sorbet! I’ve only tried it with pineapple and it came out amazing. It was so creamy it was hard to believe that it was only frozen pineapple. I sliced up a whole bunch of pineapple and put it in a tupperware container. Yes, it was annoying when I went to grab a few strips of my pineapple to find them all stuck together! Thanks for the help..apparently I need to freeze them separately before I put them together, if that makes sense.
We’ve been doing the same with our CSA box. I personally don’t like fruit “in the raw”— I know, I know. What can I say, I’m a veggie girl. But I do like to preserve the fruit frozen for use later in a spinach smoothie. My husband is our fruit eater and kept getting mad when I was freezing our blueberries before he could eat them fresh! :)
I can’t relate on the fruit, but I can the veggies! Actually, maybe I should start to freeze veggie chunks for smoothies too…. great idea.
I always loved the idea of frozen fruit, but just can’t get past the texture. Maybe someday I’ll actually start making more smoothies on the regular so I can enjoy my favorite summer fruits year round. Thanks in advance for the tips!
Thanks, Leslie! I hate to buy fruit and veggies out of season – this is one of those easy ways to eat out of season with no guilt :).