No opinion on the blanching, but I sure like the French cut frozen green beans a lot better. They don't get as tough.

I'm not crazy about frozen green beans, so just about all I use them for is 3 bean salad or a big pot of over-cooked green beans with lots of bacon and onion.

You blanch for the time in the guidelines to kill enzymes before freezing. It takes a different time for each veggie. It isn't about the texture so much as it is it to destroy enzymes that cause spoilage and deterioration.
That is the reason for blanching.

I think in part it all depends on how quickly you will use them. The guidelines on blanching say UNDER-blanching is worse than no blanching at all so I'd skip it altogether rather than doing just the 1 min. But I say that as one who only cans green beans since we don't like them frozen so don't put any stock in it. ;)

Or since I know you like to experiment Anney why not try some of each - 1 min., 3 min., and 0 min. - and compare them then let us know which works better.

Dave

PS: don't forget to save some of them to make Dilly Beans with too.

I prefer green beans canned over freezing. Even though some color is lost, I prefer the flavor and texture.
Jim in So Calif

I see that a lot of you prefer canning, but we aren't set up for canning, while freezing has served us quite well. At my age, it would take too many of my remaining years to get the techniques under my belt and the supplies bought, so I'll just have to continue with freezing things!

In the past, I HAVE frozen green beans without blanching them, Dave. They've been mushy if I didn't make sure all the air was out of the bag or if I thawed them before cooking. Otherwise, they did fine. And I must admit that we can eat them once a week but not more often than that. I like Italian green beans a lot better, think they're tastier, but my grandson loves "plain" green beans, so there you have it!

I do like the Southern version of green beans cooked forever in a ham hock and little red potatoes added toward the end. The taste can't be beat! But mostly we eat them with butter, salt, and pepper.

At any rate, thanks for responding. I didn't get around to freezing them yesterday but am headed to my setup to freeze them this morning.

In the past, I HAVE frozen green beans without blanching them, Dave. They've been mushy

Then based on what I have read I'd guess that blanching them for the 3 mins. would be much better if only because it destroys the "mushy enzyme".

Another point I thought of is do you pinch/cut off the blossom end too or just the stem end? That blossom end is the enzyme focal point so we remove both ends.

Dave

I'll put in a word for the French cut as well - we grow a local heirloom variety known as "Kings Banquet", a 10" long, flat pole bean - in other words, a big bean. We found that blanching them - boiling water, add beans, bring to boil again - then cooled and run through the Frencher, then frozen, yielded the best results.

I was pretty happy with my frozen green beans. I froze mostly Romano pole in a somewhat "beany" stage - the pods had small beans in them. I blanched a fairly short time, about two minutes.

BTW, I have a surfeit of peas this year so I will freeze some for the first time. One would suppose for freezing purposes they are identical to beans?

digdirt

With the Fortex beans, I've been removing the stem-end of the bean and leaving the curved point. Maybe I should remove both in the rest of them.

Now, note that they don't get mushy without blanching if I make sure there's no air in the package AND if they are put directly into boiling water from the freezer. That's what I normally do when cooking them anyway, so mushiness hasn't been a problem.

David & oregonwoodsmoke

I hear you about preferring the French cut! Many years ago I used to buy the Green Giant ones with slivered almonds, but then we got to be more set in our ways, I suppose. I like the mouth-feel of Frenched beans less than the whole-cut ones, but it sounds like a good thing to do with beans that may be tougher or older.

The Fortex pole beans are truly the best I've ever grown and eaten, either fresh or frozen. They're very long, eight to ten inches at even pencil-size in diameter or smaller, no strings at all, and yes, a true green pole bean.

Linda Lou

I'd think blanching would be needed for canning beans maybe more than freezing them. Wouldn't freezing beans either slow down or altogether stop the enzyme action until they reach "deterioration" temperature, whatever that is? That's what I concluded after realizing that if I quickly freeze the just-picked beans (without exposing them to air in the package after freezing) and then put them directly into boiling water from the freezer, they are nearly indistinguishable from fresh-picked beans.

I've also found something similar with corn. This was by accident. At least thirty years ago, I stopped at a road-side stand at the end of the summer and bought the guy's last bushel of corn for a dollar. I had a car-full of little boys who'd been to the beach, so when I got home, I didn't have time to shuck the corn that we didn't eat at dinner. So I tossed it into plastic garbage bags with the shucks still on and put the whole shebang into the garage freezer and promptly forgot them.

Just before Christmas, I remembered those ears of corn. When I checked, they hadn't suffered freezer-burn, so I brought out a few of them to thaw and shuck. They were absolutely delicious! We had the rest for Christmas dinner and New Year's Eve! Truly, they tasted fresh-from-the-garden, too.

So I do wonder, sometimes, about traditional wisdom, though in most cases it truly covers the situation. I suppose digdirt's advice is good advice for adventurous sorts like me, to test things out. [Of course, you can do that with freezing vegetables but not with canning them.]