Drying and freezing green beans
Hi and welcome back to the Food Saver series! Today I am talking about green beans! Drying and freezing to be exact. Usually, I try to can 2-3 batches every year on top of freezing and drying, but this year it has a been a bit strange and I didn’t get as many green beans as normal for a couple main reasons (and one or eight short fluffy reasons). One, everything seemed to come on a bit slow. I did talk to other gardeners in the area, and they too noticed that the plants just seemed a little “off” this year – I figured that that’s good that it wasn’t just me, I was starting to get a bit paranoid thinking the garden had it out for me this year!
The other reason was that early in the spring I had a bit of blight on some plants and ended up pulling them out and burning them. Luckily, I caught it early enough and it didn’t spread to the other plants. And our eight fluffy reasons were our ducks. Mainly our boys, they have an affinity for bean leaves – not the beans mind you – just the leaves! Next year I am planning for high levels security around the beans!
Drying Green Beans:
I will admit right now that I think one of the most tedious, boring jobs in the world is cutting green beans. But I have two choices: I can do it myself or I can go to the store and buy a can and pay for the convenience of having someone else do it. The poor girl in me says “cut the stinkin thing!“…sigh
The good thing is while I was looking at recipes, I came across a blogger that was mentioning that they use kitchen shears to trim the ends and cut the beans…genius! I had never even thought about scissors – so I tried it, and even through it’s still not my favorite job in the world it’s a lot faster, and my daughter can even do it! So, thank you to whoever you were since I spaced checking out the name of the blog – but Thank you!
To dry beans you will need blanch them. Start by washing them off and cutting them into uniform pieces. Then bring water to a boil and put them in the water for 2 minutes. After the 2 minutes you will pull them out and put them in an ice bath (ice and water) to stop the cooking process. Then drain them and place them on the dehydrator racks for 10-12 hours. They will be hard when fully dry.
Freezing Green Beans:
Up until this year I had always blanched green beans before freezing. But this year I was reading over an article that said that it wasn’t necessary. So, I thought I would try it and compare the blanched vs the unblanched frozen beans. My wonderful family were the guinea pigs for the experiment. Honestly, we couldn’t tell a difference. Maybe if they were in the freezer for a long period of time you could tell, but after a week in the freezer they seemed the same.
That makes life lot easier! I am always up for ways to save time!
To freeze the beans, I washed and cut the beans (with shears!) and let them drain. Then I dumped them onto a cookie sheet lined with wax paper. Popped them into the freezer and the next day pulled them out and bagged them up.
It’s my new favorite method to save green beans!
Hope you found this helpful.
-Dawn
