The Tip You Should Know To Successfully Meal Prep Frozen Greens

Beautiful bouquets of greens — bountiful arrangements of spinach, kale, bok choy, and collards — enliven every recipe that calls for fresh vegetables. But they don't last forever. Sometimes, even the best-laid weeknight dinner plans can derail into takeout territory after essential ingredients start to go bad. The last thing you want to do is let a bunch of leafy greens spoil, tossing them into the trash almost like literal cash. As a result, it's best to have a preservation plan in place before it gets to that point, but some methods of freezing fresh food are going to be more successful than others.

Now, jamming a whole bag of spinach straight in the freezer is marginally better than doing nothing at all. But not only will this quick solution take up more valuable space than necessary, it won't quite preserve the texture you might think you're protecting. Instead, blanching is a much more effective way to freeze your greens, offering far superior results and saving you from prep work later on. Plus, this meal prep hack is surprisingly only a little more time-consuming than shopping the frozen food aisle to begin with.

As always, before beginning, thoroughly rinse your greens in water. Remove any unwanted stems by tearing them away or using a sharp knife if desired. (Your eventual recipe will likely call for the stems to be discarded.) Boil about 2 quarts of salted water in a large pot. Using a colander or a steamer basket, a good alternative to a steamer pot, boil lighter greens for about one minute and heartier greens for two, before draining and transferring them to an ice bath for another couple of minutes. Next, cool and then dry them; as with fresh greens, moisture is the enemy of frozen ones. Roll and squeeze them in paper towels a few times to leach out as much liquid as possible.

To finish, shape the blanched greens into balls, arrange them on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet, give them another good water-sucking squeeze, and freeze. (Run a knife through the leaves a few times if they are still too unwieldy to shape.) Instead of using a baking sheet, you can also portion the greens into a large silicone ice tray or a muffin tin. Once frozen, you can transfer them to a resealable plastic bag to save space. Enjoy the meal-prepped veggies in pasta, on pizza, and in soups, stews, and other dishes that call for greens for up to one year.