What could be better than a plate of freshly roasted or steamed green beans? They offer a stunning sweet and slightly earthy flavor, with a slight bite that makes them simply perfect.
Add a few spices and perhaps a little butter to your beans and you have a versatile side that’s perfect on its own or alongside a protein-packed main. Seriously, you can serve beans alongside most popular dishes, including lasagna, lamb, and even pot pies.
That’s not even considering the more complex dishes that rely on green beans, like making a green bean salad, serving the beans with garlic and parmesan, or trying something like these Green Beans in Black Olive Tapenade.
The challenge is preservation. Green beans are a warm season crop, so they grow prolifically in the warm months, then stop producing as the weather cools.
Freezing is the most obvious preservation approach, so you’ll need to learn how to freeze green beans. The process of freezing green beans is as simple as prepping them, washing and drying them, then getting them into a freezer bag.
However, there’s a pressing question to answer – should you blanch your beans first or not? Traditional recommendations say that blanching is the way to go. But, as you’ll see, some people heartily disagree.
P.S. Although we’re talking about green beans in this post, the same approaches apply to yellow beans and purple beans as well. Some people even freeze green and yellow beans together in the same bag.
How To Freeze Green Beans
Freezing beans is surprisingly simple. You just need to do some basic prep, blanch them, dry them, and get them into freezer bags. You might even be able to skip the blanching step entirely, which makes the process faster still.
Steps For Freezing Green Beans
Step 1: Choose Your Beans
The first step is to choose the beans you want to freeze. These should be as fresh as possible and firm, with no discoloration. Finding such beans will be easy if you’re growing them yourself at home.
If you’re buying from the store instead, try to buy loose beans and choose the best beans from the selection. If you’re forced to buy bagged ones instead, some of the beans mightn’t be suitable for freezing. You’ll just need to eat those beans soon instead of preserving them.
Step 2: Prep Your Beans
Next, you’ll need to prep the beans. Doing so generally involves washing them, removing the tip, and possibly cutting off the tails as well. If your beans have a fibrous string along the pod, you’ll also need to remove this before freezing.
You can freeze the beans whole or you might cut them into smaller pieces. Cut green beans are often more practical, as you can simply throw them in soups and stews as-is. Still, you might keep the beans whole if you plan to cook them and serve them on their own after freezing.
One other consideration here – do you need to wash your beans?
Beans should be washed as a general rule because they can easily get contaminated from the soil. However, you might be able to skip this step if you’re growing pole beans and don’t use any concerning chemicals on them.
Step 3: Blanching (Optional)
Next, you blanch your beans. Doing so involves throwing them in a pot of boiling water for just a couple of minutes, draining them, and plunging them straight into ice water.
Once the beans are cool, you’ll need to dry them completely before freezing them. Don’t leave any moisture, as moisture contributes to freezer burn.
Step 4: Bag Them Up
Once the beans are cool and dry, you simply need to bag them up and get them in the freezer. Resealable freezer-safe bags are excellent here. Just be sure to get as much air as possible out of the bag before putting it in the freezer, as air quickly leads to freezer burn.
An optional extra step is to freeze the beans on a baking sheet first, then transfer them to the bag. This stops the beans from sticking together, which is helpful if you don’t want to use a full bag at a time.
You can use a solid container instead of a bag, just make sure the size is suitable for your beans. The container should be mostly full, with just half an inch or so of headroom to allow for expansion.
Should You Blanch The Beans?
Traditional recommendations suggest that blanching is a crucial part of freezing beans. Doing so destroys some enzymes, leading to better color, texture, and flavor after freezing. At least, that’s the theory.
Yet, this traditional wisdom mightn’t be true at all.
Some bloggers and YouTubers have experimented with this, finding that their unblanched beans actually turn out better (like in the video at the beginning of the approach). This isn’t even that surprising, given you’re partly cooking the beans as you blanch them, which changes their texture.
Skipping the blanching step blanching also saves you time. That’s powerful if you’re growing beans and have a large harvest to process and freeze.
So, should you blanch or not? Many people claim unblanched beans turn out just as good, but not everyone agrees. The specific variety of bean and duration of freezing could make a big difference. In particular, blanching may be important for thicker green beans or longer freezing times, but not if you’re focusing on thin beans or freezing for just a few months.
The best approach is to experiment. Freeze one bag of blanched beans and one of unblanched beans and see how each turns out. You’ll quickly learn which style you prefer.
Tips For Freezing Green Beans
Freeze Them Quickly
Freezing quickly is one of the most powerful ways to maintain the quality of your beans. The freezer you use can make a big difference here. In particular, chest freezers often freeze more quickly than smaller home freezers.
You can even buy freezers with flash freezing technology. These give your frozen vegetables the best possible quality, although they can be expensive.
Arranging your beans on a baking sheet and freezing them this way helps the beans freeze faster as well. Just make sure they don’t thaw too much when you transfer them from the tray to your freezer bag.
Don’t Overfill Your Freezer
Air doesn’t circulate well when there’s too much food in your freezer. That leads to uneven freezing and freezer burn – effects that mess with the quality of your food. Around 75% to 80% full is ideal for efficiency and quality.
Label Your Packages
It’s easy to forget when you put something in the freezer, especially if you freeze plenty of food. So, be sure to label the beans with the date you froze them.
You might also want to include extra information, like the variety of beans, whether they were blanched, and how you cut them. Remember, it’s often hard to see what’s in a freezer bag when it has been in the freezer for a while.
Rotate Beans
If you’re freezing beans regularly, try to use the oldest ones first. The easiest way to do this is to always add new beans to the back of the stack and take new ones from the front.
Think About the Container Size
If you’re cooking beans from frozen, you may want to freeze them in portion-sized bags. This way, you can dump the entire bag into your pot or pan without trying to separate out the frozen mass.
How To Use Frozen Green Beans
Frozen green beans are incredibly easy to use. You can often work with them as-is without needing to thaw them first.
For example, if you’re making a soup or a stew, you can throw your green beans in towards the end of cooking. They will quickly defrost and cook, especially if you blanched them before freezing.
You can also cook frozen green beans in a frypan with a little oil over high heat. This prevents them from getting soggy and makes the beans surprisingly crisp.
It’s even possible to place frozen green beans in a 450°F oven for five to eight minutes. The beans should crisp up nicely and be ready to serve as a side dish or on their own.
If you want to thaw the beans, it’s best to place them in the fridge overnight. This allows them to thaw slowly, giving them the best possible texture. If you need beans sooner, try placing them in a colander and running cold water over them. They should thaw quickly.
How Freezing Changes Green Beans
No matter how careful you are, freezing will always change your green beans. This is partly because ice crystals form when the beans are frozen and these crystals damage the cell walls. These crystals melt as your beans thaw, but the damage to the cell walls remains.
Because of such changes, thawed beans tend to be softer than fresh ones, often with a duller color and less taste as well.
Freezing beans rapidly and thawing them slowly minimizes such issues, as can cooking over high heat. Even so, thawed beans will never have the same flavor and texture as fresh ones.
How Long Do Frozen Beans Last?
As with most produce, frozen beans should last up to a year in the freezer, but will be best within the first few months. However, that time recommendation is mostly about quality rather than safety. You could potentially eat the beans after a year (and some people do). They just won’t taste as good.
Popular Types Of Green Beans
First, green beans have multiple names, including green beans, snap beans, and string beans. Some aren’t even green but might be purple or yellow instead.
The different types are mostly interchangeable and can be used in all the same recipes. However, some are thicker, so they take longer to cook and have a different texture when you’re eating them.
Differences in thickness may also affect how you freeze green beans. In particular, experiments from bloggers suggest that unblanched thin beans freeze as well as blanched ones, or perhaps even better. The same may not be true for thicker beans.
Here are a few interesting types of beans and their differences. There are many more types out there, all with their own features.
Haricots Verts
These thin and delicate beans are sometimes known as French green beans. They cook quickly and are excellent as a salad ingredient. The beans freeze and thaw well too.
Romano Beans
Romano beans also go by the name flat beans, not surprisingly, as they are wide and flat. They offer a decent amount of flavor, but require more cooking than some other types of beans.
While these beans are often green, you may see some purple or yellow versions as well.
Purple String Beans
These are simply purple versions of regular green beans. As such, they have a familiar flavor and are used in the same way.
However, the purple color doesn’t stick around. It quickly disappears with cooking and can even decrease when you freeze the beans.
Long Beans
As the name suggests, these beans are much longer than normal (they can grow up to a foot in length). They offer an interesting flavor too, one that’s richer and a touch nuttier than regular green beans.
Other Ways To Preserve Green Beans
Dehydrating Green Beans
With dehydration, you’re removing moisture from the green beans, which stops microbes from growing, while also making the beans much lighter and crisper.
A dehydrator is the best tool here, as it works at low temperatures for a long period and gets the beans as dry as possible. You can also use the oven, but there may be a little excess water left in the green beans.
Dehydrated beans can be eaten as they are or rehydrated. When eaten as-is, they’re crisp and a little like homemade veggie chips. Once rehydrated, you can use them much like fresh beans, although the texture and flavor will have changed somewhat.
That said, if you’re using rehydrated beans in a soup or stew, the texture difference mightn’t be that obvious. You could even simply throw the dehydrated green beans into your soup during cooking and they’ll rehydrate and cook along the way.
Canning Green Beans
Canning is another popular preservation method. Pressure canning is the best approach here, as green beans are a low acid food, so there’s the risk of botulism bacteria with other canning approaches.
Some people cook the beans before canning them, while others simply add raw beans and boiling water to the jars instead.
Preserving With Salt
Salt is a traditional tool for preserving, as bacteria don’t grow well in a high salt environment. This approach is simpler than drying or pickling the beans, but you will need to soak and rinse the beans afterwards to remove the excess salt.
One approach is to seal the green beans in jars with saltwater brine. Alternatively, you can simply lay the beans in salt for a few days, then seal them in canning jars with the salt.
Beans preserved this way should be kept in the fridge. Some reports suggest they will last just a month or two, while others suggest a year or perhaps longer.
Pickled Beans
Finally, you can pickle your green beans, just like you would pickle cucumbers or many other vegetables. We’re specifically looking at the fermented version of pickles here, which rely on a salt brine and natural fermentation.
Fermented pickled beans last anywhere from a few months to a year and are best kept in the fridge. The fermentation means these beans even contain probiotics and could help with your gut health.
Of course, fermented green beans end up being salty, tangy, and a little sour. While this can be an enjoyable flavor, it’s quite different than fresh green beans.
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