If you grow your own collard greens, then you might find you have an overabundance when it comes to harvest time, so what do you do with the excess?
Can You Freeze Collard Greens?
Yes, you can freeze collard greens for up to 12 months, so there is no need for any to go to waste. You do need to blanch the greens first and then pack them in airtight bags in the freezer.
Do Do Collard Greens freeze well? Sometimes
Can you refreeze Collard Greens? No
How to Freeze Collard Greens
Collard greens are delicious and great for your health, so it is worth having some in the freezer, but there is a little prep work to freeze them fully. This means you do need to blanch them first.
If you don’t follow the blanching method, the greens are unlikely to survive without becoming a mushy mess in the freezer. It isn’t as complex and daunting as it sounds, so let’s look at how you can freeze collard greens.
- Pick the Best: Pick out the collard greens you want to freeze. Only pick out undamaged stems with no blemishes to ensure you can successfully freeze them.
- Wash: Wash them well under cold running water to remove any dirt, grit and bugs that might be making their home in the leaves.
- Chop: Chop or tear the leaves into manageable sizes. Small leaves should be fine to leave whole, but large leaves must be chopped.
- Boil Water: Grab a large pot and boil some water. You need enough water to ensure you can cover the greens you have. If you have a large number of collard greens, then you might need to blanch them in batches.
- Prepare for Blanching: While you wait for the water to come to a boil, get a bowl of ice-cold water reading alongside a colander.
- Blanch: When the water is boiling, you need to plunge the collard greens in. If you have a metal colander, you can put the leaves into it and plunge the whole colander into the water. Leave the collard greens in the water for 3 minutes, then plunge into the ice water.
- Drain: Leave them there for 3 minutes and then take them out and drain them. Let the collard greens dry as much as possible.
- Bag Up: When dry, pop the greens into freezer bags. If you prefer, make small portion-size balls and then put them in freezer bags. Just be careful not to handle the greens too much.
- Seal: Squeeze out as much air as possible from the bags. If you have a straw handy, you can seal the bags almost all the way and then put the straw in to suck out all the air. When you are finished, seal the bags tightly.
- Label and Freeze: Label with the date and contents. Pop the bags into the freezer to freeze.
3 Tips for Freezing Collard Greens
Now you know how to freeze them, we’ve got our 3 top tips which we strongly recommend following when freezing collard greens to have the best results:
Pack Into Balls
To save space in your freezer, pack the collard greens into balls before freezing. The size of a tennis ball should work and provide a good portion of your favourite collard greens.
Airtight is Vital
Make sure you make your bags of collard greens as airtight as possible before popping them into the freezer. You can keep your greens in the freezer for a long time, and any air can cause the flavour of the greens to deteriorate.
Squeeze Excess Moisture
If your greens retain too much water, you can give them a light squeeze as they are draining. These leafy greens absorb moisture, so squeezing can help them freeze well.
How Long Can You Freeze Collard Greens?
If you blanch and then store your collard greens in the freezer, then they will keep well for a super long time! You can freeze them for up to 12 months before the veggies start to deteriorate.
Collard greens will keep for between 3 and 5 days in the fridge when uncooked. Cooked and cooled greens can be kept for around 2 days.
How Do You Defrost Collard Greens?
The best way to cook and heat your collard greens once they have been frozen is to not defrost them at all. Pop them into your recipe or cook them up using your favourite method right from frozen.
If you want to thaw the greens out before cooking, you can pop them into a bowl and put them into the fridge to thaw them out overnight.
This is likely to produce a bit of moisture, so don’t forget the bowl, or you could end up with the water leaking into your fridge.
Can You Refreeze Collard Greens?
No, you can’t refreeze collard greens.
Their texture and structure will change a little in the freezer, and if you try and refreeze, you may find that the texture becomes too mushy to be edible.
Do Collard Greens Freeze Well?
Collard greens do freeze well, but they do change. They freeze well because they keep their goodness and can be kept for a long time.
However, the texture of the greens will have changed.
The veg will be much softer and retain more water than if you cooked them freshly. This doesn’t stop them from being delicious, though, so there is no reason not to freeze up your excess collard greens.
Related FAQs
If you’ve still got questions about freezing collard greens or greens in general, then these may help:
You can freeze uncooked collard greens, but we strongly recommend blanching them beforehand. This does not cook collard greens but helps to secure nutrients, flavour, texture and colour.
Although it is possible to freeze cooked collard greens, you risk overcooking them once thawed and reheated, resulting in mushy greens. Instead, try to freeze them blanched only.
We advise removing collard greens from the bag they came in as you’ll want to blanch them before freezing them to prevent them losing their texture, colour and flavour.
Mahalo Plenty. I’ve been parboiling veggies for years and storing them, like broccoli and green beans for instance. Never knew you could do this to Greens until I got an abundance of them and our garden right before a hard freeze. Amazing how much they come packed when you put them into a fist size ball
I’m a huge fan of greens, especially collard greens! Love them! Super happy to hear you’ve found the article useful for freezing them 🙂