Putting Up Peas And Beans MD

Hi GG.

I posted on this topic last year and to answer your questions I will just repost that.

Vegetables are plentiful here in the spring and summer. When I was a kid, our family had an almost two acre garden. I hated it back then, chopping weeds, picking peas and beans and hours of shelling and helping put them up. We do not grow them anymore, but in Mississippi there usually are multiple places to purchase them, either picked to be shelled, or already shelled. As a lazy guy and one half of the decision maker status at my house I vote to buy them ready to put up.

We put up purple hull peas:



Lady peas:



Sweet Corn:



Pinto Beans:



and butter beans:



All of the peas and beans are put up (Frozen) the same way. They are never clean, so the first step is to wash them. This can take a while and washes away the dust and dirt and any stems, hulls and bad beans or peas.

Then they go into a large pan, are covered with water and heated to a boil for five to twenty minutes to blanch. The heat of blanching denatures the enzymes (naturally in the vegetable) to stop the deterioration process and set the color. Then freezing preserves the vegetable.

As the water begins to simmer, foam will begin to form. The amount of foam you get in the blanching process is dependent on the vegetable.










The foam is skimmed away and discarded with a slotted spoon, along with any bits of trash that might float up with the foam.

Blanching continues as long as you like. Since the vegetables are cooking during blanching, You might want to stop before they are fully cooked. Having said that, we blanch ours maybe 15 to 20 minutes which allows them to cook more quickly when we actually cook them from frozen later.

When blanching is complete, the heat is turned off and the peas/beans/corn are allowed to cool. We add whatever water we will need during bagging for the freezer at this point. While blanching and cooling, the vegetables will take on water and almost every time, you will have less water (broth) when they have cooled than is there when blanching is complete and the heat is turned off.

We cheat cooling by using a small fan to blow across the hot vegetables during cooling. It greatly shortens the cooling time.

My parents used plastic freezer bags and rubber bands and twist ties to contain the vegetables for freezing. I have seen people use small square, stackable plastic containers with snap on lids. We use ZipLock Freezer bags. And we put our vegetables up in two serving portions, since most of the time, there are only two of us eating. If our kids come for mealtime, we just cook multiple bags. It works fine that way.

For us, a double portion is a little more than a cup of vegetable, followed by enough liquid to cover the portion in the bag.



The wife (MHNBPF) and I work really well together and usually she portions the vegetables while I hold the bag open and then seal and stack it in a pan to contain the shape until it freezes in our chest freezer or the freezer compartment in one of the two refrigerators we have.

You can see the amount of water we add here. Actually a lot of the minerals and vitamins that make vegetables good for you are in that water that renders during the blanching process. What a shame to throw them away, when the liquid tastes so good over some cornbread!



The pan of peas shown above will take at least 14-24 hours to freeze, depending on the heat burden you expose your freezer to when attempting to freeze them.





We place several cardboard boxes in our chest freezer and keep the many bags of vegetables we have at the end of season separated so it is not so hard to find them in February.

Here are similar photos for creamed corn.









IMO, there is little that is better than being able to go to the freezer most any day and take out peas, or beans or corn for a nice out of season vegetable meal. We are richly blessed at our house to be able to do this and to have a marriage that allows us to work together as a team to do these things. I admire the people who plant, grow, harvest and put up freezers full of vegetables for their families every year.


All of my stuff

I like corn stock/broth in soups. Never thought about putting it up for later use.

At the moment, we have too much (Ha!) chicken broth frozen in glass pint mason jars in the freezer (maybe 10 pints) to even think about putting up corn broth. I am not complaining, but our side by side freezer, where we would store that kind of stuff is pretty full at the moment.

Sorry - this sounds a lot like bragging but we also have four pints of lemon curd in glass pint mason jars in the freezer, thanks to a generous Christmas gift of Meyer Lemons from my brother in Lake Jackson, TX.

Back to corn:

I like the trend over the past fifteen years or so that made fresh corn available year-round in the produce section at the grocery market. Back in the 60-70s we only saw fresh corn for a short time at the market and then none for the rest of the year - until the following spring. These days, if I am making a chowder (fish or shrimp or clam or crawfish or oyster), I just buy a couple of ears of fresh corn in the market and then boil the cobs to make a broth. I do that for soup, too. Adds a great flavor to the soup.

Nice gift for sure.

I had tons of lemons on my trees last year until the few days of freeze came. Not a single piece of fruit this year. Hopefully, next year, they'll come back. Same thing happened a few years ago and last year was the best crop ever since that freeze.

I didn't know you could freeze lemon curd! Good to know, thanks.

LSU Ag Center has a publication with instructions on blanching, freeing, etc. LINK

They have you do small amounts and then quick cool them before bagging and freezing.

That may be scientifically best, but it takes forever with large quantities. My folks have done it for years in big batches similar to how MD does it, and the food always tastes great.

The LSU publication is good for general info in why you blanch, how long for different veg, etc.

I've found that we can dry freeze pintos and peas, and they are well preserved even after several months. No enzyme action yet. So we tend to buy just enough to make it through one winter and do the lazy freeze method.