Freezing Swiss Chard

Clean chard by placing in a sink full of water and swishing around.

Drain the water and rinse again because leafy greens can be really dirty and have bugs.

After the second sink rinse I rinse leaves individually under slowly running water just to be sure the leaves are clean. Place the leaves in a strainer to drain making sure to tip the strainer before lifting out of sink as the leaves will hold water.

Put a large pot of water on the stove to boil. You will want to blanch the leaves and stems to stop the enzyme action prior to freezing.

Place leaves on a cutting board and cut out the stem.

Place the leaves in one pile and the stems in another.

Once you have a large bowl full of leaves, place them in the boiling water for 3 minutes. Stir to make sure they don’t stick together. After the time is up, remove from water with a slotted spoon leaving the water for the next batch of chard. Place the leaves directly into an ice bath for 3 minutes to stop the cooking process. You can reuse the blanching water up to 5 times.

After the leaves are cool, place back on cutting board and chop. I place 1cup of chopped leaves into Ziplock snack bags, remove air, seal and freeze flat. When frozen, place all snack bags into a larger freezer bag for long term storage.

After all the leaves are blanched, cut the stems into small pieces and blanch for 3 minutes. Remove from water with a slotted spoon and add to ice bath for 3 minutes. Don’t worry if you can’t get all the stem pieces out of the water because you can use the leftover water to make tasty soup stock.

Note: Chop the leaves after they are blanched but the stems before. The leaves are hard to remove from the boiling water when chopped and the stems are tough to chop after they are blanched.