Frozen virtue

A few days ago I waxed poetic about the joys of eating in season. There is something magical about a taste of spring’s first rhubarb pie, the first sweet-tart raspberries bursting on your tongue as you pick them off the vine, and the first BLT made with a juicy, perfectly ripe tomato. As much as these fleeting moments make up for the dearth of fresh produce in the dark days of winter, there is an argument to be made for cheating on this ideal. It does not involve purchasing sad substitutes for in-season fruits and vegetables, but rather an unsung hero already in your kitchen: your freezer. It holds the key to enjoying bursts of summer well into the winter. 

Frozen produce allows you savor the flavors of summer all year long. While the texture of frozen fruits and vegetables will never compete with fresh, the flavors and colors hold up remarkably well, and frozen items can also be nutritionally superior to weeks-old supermarket produce as well. Wintertime supermarket strawberries may be insipid, but as indexed magazine Taste of Home shows us, there are a multitude of ways to enjoy vibrant strawberry flavor by using frozen berries. They’ve got recipes for everything from vinaigrette to scones to cheesecake. Since I have a stash of strawberries from the nearby u-pick farm that I need to use up before this season’s berries are ripe, I was glad to find this. These ideas will bolster my go-to for using frozen berries: making fruit puree and fruit cloud cream from The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

You don’t have to wait for an article to materialize to find inspiration for using frozen fruits and vegetables. The EYB Library contains plenty of online recipes, including over 2,500 ideas for frozen peas, 135 recipes for frozen berries, 88 ways to use frozen broccoli, and 66 recipes incorporating frozen peaches. Search the EYB Library to find the perfect use for any frozen summertime favorites you have stashed away in your freezer. What’s your go-to recipe to use frozen fruits or vegetables? 

Photo of Strawberry-apple cobbler from Bake from Scratch Magazine