How to Freeze Broccoli

This may be totally obvious and easy to everyone, but I know this was a useful skill for me to learn, and something I had never done in America. Freezing broccoli!

Reasons I love to freeze broccoli:

1. You can't buy frozen broccoli in India. Boo.

2. Broccoli is also not available year around here. Learned that the sad, hard way when broccoli was out of season and no where to be found for several months.

3. I always have broccoli on hand, so if I ever have an oops-I-forgot-to-plan-dinner day, I can easily whip up my Chicken & Broccoli Stir Fry.

4. It makes me feel better that more of the bugs have been killed and removed throughout the process.

5. It's partially cooked through, so when it comes time to use it in a dish it takes less time to cook that fresh.

Here's a step by step how to freeze some broccoli for yourself!

1. Trim your broccoli from the stem. I personally love broccoli but hate the stems, so I trim mine very very close to the leafy part. You can make fun of me if you want, I'm totally secure in my 5 year old eating preferences.

2. Clean your broccoli. This is the part where I kind of freak out in India. Growing up in America, I remember my mom always soaking fresh broccoli in salt water to encourage any little buggies to come out. Multiply that by 1,000 in India where I have very low expectations of their cleaning abilities (aka watching tiny cock roaches crawl all over the fresh produce at the grocery store. Yep.). Or maybe it's because I've seen the little bugs floating in the water after I boiled it to freeze. So I'm a little over zealous about cleaning the broccoli here (which is one reason I love going through all the steps of freezing it!)  Combine a few tablespoons of white distilled vinegar and a teaspoon or so of salt with several cups of filtered water (tap water is fine in America). Let your broccoli soak in the vinegar water for about 10 minutes, swishing it around a couple of times during the process. Drain the broccoli and rinse with more filtered water.

3. Bring a pot of water to a boil, and then we're going to blanch the broccoli. Basically that means cooking it for just a few minutes and then quickly cooling it down to stop the cooking process so it doesn't cook all the way through. Add the broccoli to the boiling water and boil for 3 minutes.

4. Prepare a bowl of filtered ice water. After the 3 minutes of boiling, drain the broccoli and immediately add it to the bowl of ice water. Let it soak in the ice water for 3 minutes, swishing it around a couple of times.

5. Drain the broccoli, and spread it out on a kitchen towel to dry. The drier you let your broccoli get at this point, the fewer ice crystals will form on it in the freezer.

See how close to the leaves those are cut? Perfect! :)

6. After the broccoli is dry, put it in a Ziploc bag - I happened to bring some Ziploc freezer bags from America, so that's what I used, but you could use the Indian brand. Or you could also use an air tight plastic container if you don't have plastic bags. In an ideal world you could even portion these out into smaller bags so you're not exposing the broccoli to the air every time you open the bag to take some out, but I don't have any smaller bags from America, and the ones in India are just too expensive to justify that. I haven't had any major problems in this area though.

Suck out as much of the air as possible (I even used a straw and literally sucked extra air out). Pop the bag in the freezer. 

Done!