how i freeze green beans in red sauce, and 14 more food-storage tips

SO MANY GREEN BEANS, so little time. That’s how I always feel around now: how to keep up with the glut of one of my favorite vegetables. I don’t like them canned (all olive green and overcooked!) and they can lose crunch or get ice-encrusted when blanched and frozen plain, so I put mine up in canning jars in the freezer, doused in homemade tomato sauce. Read how I freeze green beans and many more garden-fresh goodies.

freezing green beans in tomato sauceMY METHOD FOR FREEZING green beans is simple, and results in one of my favorite red-sauce variations for serving over brown rice or pasta. Instead of blanching beans in boiling water, then quick-chilling them in ice water before freezing plain, I cut them up and put them into my homemade tomato sauce at the very last moment that it’s cooking. Assuming the sauce is bubbling, they’ll “blanch” in it immediately, so I take it off the heat at once and let it cool. The beans will turn bright green (as water-blanched ones so), but you don’t want them to cook through.

Ladle the bean-filled sauce into wide-mouth jars (freezer bags, as below, will work, too), leaving headroom for expansion of the food if it’s liquidy such as this one, and freeze. Straight-sided jars (rather than ones with “shoulders”) are best for freezing, and again: wide mouths.

Alternatively, for maximum control of the beans’ degree of crunch: Blanch or steam the beans very lightly, quick-chill in ice water, then put into red sauce that’s already cooled and ready to freeze.

Barely blanched beans in the sauce seem to hold up better than those frozen “naked”–no ice crystals form on the beans, and they have better texture when I warm them up to eat later on my rice or pasta. With a heavy-handed drizzle of good olive

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