I “put up” 22 quart bags of kale last week and there is plenty more to do this weekend. Last weekend, I took pictures of the process, anticipating a blog entry. It took a whole week, but here you go…freezing kale!
1. Pick the kale. I knew I was going to chop it so I didn’t get too picky about leaf size, just dumping everything into a grocery bag.
2. Wash well. This grows in dirt, folks, so cleaning is essential. I floated mine in the kitchen sink. I did about one sink load at a time
and that yielded 4 to 5 quarts of frozen kale.
3. I had my large pot about half filled with water and coming to a boil while I chopped. I stacked the kale leaves, rolled them and then sliced them into strips.
4. Into the boiling water, for about 2 minutes. Since I wanted to be able to reuse the boiling water, I scooped the cooked kale out with a large colander and am on the lookout for a great bamboo scoop. Then, into ice water. From there, I took it out, gave it a squeeze and put it on clean towels to dry a bit more.
5. One more gentle squeeze and I made piles on the cookie sheets about the size I wanted. I slid these into the freezer for an hour or so or overnight with the last tray…then into the quart bags. Since I didn’t have official “freezer” bags, I put four quart bags in gallon freezer bags to help with preservation.
I don’t think this is a product that will live forever in the freezer but we’ll have kale again in that fall so I just need enough to get me through the summer.
I did all my chopping with my knife except for a brief attempt at using the food processor. It did not work well: not consistent so I ended up with big pieces and then very little pieces. Not wanting to waste a bit of kale (goodness knows we might run out ;-), I made kale pesto with garlic, parmesan cheese and olive oil. We spread it on leftover garlic bread and ran it under the broiler. Quite good, if I do say so myself.
The next experiment is putting it in breads and muffins.
We would kale, spinach, rllaey good onions and garlic, beets (my favorite), different types of lettuce, berries, bananas, peaches, tomatoes, mangos, papayas every 2 weeks we would just get a box with maybe 30+ pounds of produce. A lot of seasonal things are grown year round down there, so that made cooking for Betty easy. Not all of it was locally grown in South Florida, some would come from Georgia or other Southern states.