How To Freeze Your Harvest Properly | Near-Perfect Food Preservation!

This was another landmark video that we "for sure" wanted to get done this season! While we do practice the majority of various food preservation techniques out there every year, blanch and freeze has become our absolute go-to for a large portion of our garden. We have an in-depth article on this topic that you might find helpful. It covers things like the timing a lot of other details that you might also find helpful if you're exploring this preservation technique more thoroughly: https://frostygarden.com/topics/our-g... A lot of gardeners skip over the freezing preservation process, perhaps because of various stigmas surrounding it or issues they've had with storage longevity. This video addresses all of these issues and hopefully challenges any paradigms you might have around frozen foods. We've been practicing blanch and freeze now for quite awhile, but only within the last five years or so has it become our "primary" preservation technique. The more we used the foods we were preserving this way and the amount of time we spend compared to other preservation methods squarely put this technique well ahead of others. We hope our experience in this topic illustrates ways you can make the process much easier to perform it. We tried to show the things we have developed that speed things up and make this process an overall breeze, making it a far superior preservation technique. As northern gardeners, freezing food makes a ton of sense for us. We keep our freezers outdoors (under cover, of course) and thus the outdoor temperatures over the winter greatly aid our ability to freeze food. In a lot of ways, we are working with our particular environment to assist us in the preservation process. Also, my sincere apologies for the weird video aberrations in this video. I was trying a new neutral density filter and my test footage didn't do this. I think it has to do with exposure, I'm still learning (and trying to get better at) videography. As usual, when you try to learn how to do something better, it sometimes comes at a steep learning curve! (I'm also aware of one spelling mistake, a bad transition and an improper audio fade in this video, FWIW.) If you liked this video, we'd love it if you gave us a like & a sub! We're slowly building a growing catalog of versatile content across cold climate gardening efforts and your support has inspired us to keep going! Our growing season is quickly coming to an end here! We're not sure how much content we'll be able to produce in the next 2-3 weeks as we're game-on for a ton of harvesting and preservation. We might try to do a quick VLOG video or something like that. Winter sets in early here in Alaska, but there's still a little bit more time to enjoy! As always, you can check us out at https://FrostyGarden.com where we have a ton of deep dive articles on cold climate gardening and other aspects of home scale food production! 0:00 Introduction 0:24 Why We Use Blanch & Freeze 1:38 What Is Blanch & Freeze? 2:11 How It Works 2:40 How Long Is Food Good For? 3:11 Food Safety 3:40 Frozen Food Stigmas 4:47 Tools Needed 5:26 Blanching Times 6:43 Blanch & Freeze Process In Detail 7:00 Preparing Your Food 7:41 Preparing The Preservation Environment 8:08 The Blanching Process 8:40 The Cooling Process 9:02 The Drying Process 9:24 The Packaging Process 9:53 The Freezing Process 10:15 Using Blanch & Frozen Food 11:15 That's A Wrap