Hot or sweet, red or green, we’ve been buying all the peppers we can at the farmers market while they’re in season. Some are for eating right away, but the majority of these beauties are destined for our freezer. We’ll see them later this winter!
Peppers do change a little during the freezing process and tend to become limp and watery once thawed. This is totally fine for cooked dishes like pasta sauces and stir-fries, but thawed peppers aren’t the best choice for salads and other raw preparations.
• Fresh Peppers - Wash, stem, and seed all the peppers, and then cut them into strips or chunks, depending on how you typically use them. Spread all the pieces out in a single layer on a baking sheet and freeze for an hour or so. This helps the pieces freeze faster and keeps them loose in the bag, making it easier to take just the amount you need when cooking. Transfer the pieces to a freezer bag and push out as much air as possible before sealing.
• Roasted Peppers - Peel, stem, and seed all the peppers after roasting them and then seal them inside freezer bags. For large bell peppers, we like to leave them whole and stack them between layers of wax paper before sealing them in a freezer bag. For smaller hot peppers, we usually mince them and freeze them in ice cube trays.
Be sure to label the bags so you know what kind of peppers you have (hot or sweet) and the date you froze them. Peppers will keep for several months in the freezer, but keep an eye out for freezer burn. Stack them in the very back of your freezer, where they will stay coldest, and use the earliest-frozen peppers first.
Related: Mix and Match: Bagged Freezer Meals at Home
(Image: Flickr member recubejim licensed under Creative Commons)
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I always use a straw to suck out extra air from freezer bags, works really well for limiting air contact to frozen food.
I wish I had a freezer large enough for this!
I would *love* to see a post on general tips for freezing end-of-summer farmers market goodies.
I am KICKING myself because I missed the end of blueberries before getting around to stocking up my freezer. How did I let that happen? Grrr. But I would love to know what else freezes really well. I've been freezing a bunch of corn. Anyone have any luck with zucchini? I feel like I've tried it in the past and it just turns out spongy and watery...but I'm wondering maybe if I shredded, salted, and squeezed it out would it freeze OK?
Thank you for this post! I love medium hot peppers, and crave them as stuffed peppers all winter long. As I have seen supplies at my local farmer's market dwindling, I have been wondering if I could buy some and freeze them for use in the winter. This freezing method fills me with hope, and I'll definitely try it! :)
I've found that spicy foods loose some of their spice when they are refrigerated or frozen for very long. This has happened with salsa, burgers with serranos chopped up inside, and a couple of other things. If you are going to that and use chiles from the freezer, I suggest you test it out and possibly use more than you normally do.
@Brooklynnina - salted, drained and shredded is the answer, all right. No need to squeeze by hand if you put it in a colander, put a plate on top and weight it. Only way I'd bother to freeze zucchini.
But then, I only make savory things with it... if you were thinking zucchini bread it would probably be best to just shred and drain w/out the aid of salt.
Should add I only freeze Romanesco zucchini. It's denser (and a lot more flavorful) than other varieties. Used to be you had to grow it to get it, but I'm seeing it more and more often at farmers' markets so think it must be catching on.
Just found this... but I make zucchini bread a lot, using shredded zucchini I freeze. Just shred, bag, and freeze. It will have a lot of liquid when you thaw it, but that's the liquid which would be in fresh zucchini if you were using fresh for a recipe, it has just separated. Recipes are written expecting the zucchini to have liquid, so just dump the whole bag into the batter and continue.
I freeze mine in the measured amounts required by my favorite recipe, so it's always easy to use.