Freezing spinach

For spinach, you have the option of canning or freezing. You could probably dry it as well, but for us there was no question - freezing was likely to have the best texture and flavor. But you can't just rinse the leaves and shove them into the freezer - I'm not sure what would happen if you did that, but at the very least it would taste bad.

We rinsed the spinach leaves by dunking them in water, shaking them around, and then putting them in a colander. My spouse rinsed them before tearing off the parts he didn't want to preserve, while I removed the parts I didn't want before rinsing. I think either method is fine but my method meant having to change the water fewer times. Sometimes a clump of dirt or a little big would come off, which is a normal part of growing food. We just picked the parts we would want to eat if we were making a salad - we probably could've included more leaves, but I wanted this frozen spinach to be extra good! In the photo below you can see the bowl of spinach ready to be blanched.


Then, you blanch. This stops the growing process. We decided to use the steam blanching method rather than the immersion blanching method. For immersion blanching, you put the spinach in lightly boiling water for two minutes (precision is important when preserving food). For steam blanching, according to my resources, you just increase the time by 50% - so three minutes. We used a steamer pot and put a very thin layer of leaves in.


Then, you ice bath them. This stops the cooking process. This was kind of difficult - we didn't have enough ice on hand. But we did the best we could and I would just spoon the steamed spinach into the ice bath, swirl them around with my hand until they felt cooler than room temperature. Then we put them in a colander to drain.


Then, you remove the excess water. The more water you remove, the longer the spinach will keep in the freezer. My source recommended using a salad spinner, but we didn't have one so we did the best we could using a spoon to squeeze as much water out as possible. The following photo shows my spouse trying to squeeze as much excess water out as he could - even though we thought the spinach was well-drained, once it was in the bag we could see that there was a lot of water still hanging around.


Then, you put them in bags. We used quart-sized freezer bags and labelled the date, the vegetable, and any other information. For example, I wasn't sure if we were supposed to remove the stems or not so we did one with stems, one without. We're almost certain that you don't have to remove the stems, which is nice because doing so is time consuming. But, perhaps it will taste better.

We harvested enough for two quart-sized bags. In the future I will try to do more to get more water out, because I can tell there are a lot of ice crystals in the bags already. I don't think this will hurt the flavor as long as we use it relatively quickly - I'm guessing three months? I will say that we sampled some of the spinach and the quality - both taste and texture - was phenomenal when judged against the standard of supermarket frozen spinach. I'm excited to see how it holds up!