Freezing berries

This year I have started freezing more berries. This is mostly inspired by an episode of Good Eats, where Alton Brown took the following steps to save delicious blueberries for winter:

1. Rinse the berries and towel dry.
2. Lay berries out on a tray and put directly into freezer with no covering.
3. After the berries are good and frozen, pour them into a Ziploc freezer bag.

This method is awesome because the berries are totally frozen, but they don't stick to each other, so you can use them again easily in batches if you need to.

Today we went blackberry picking at the Valley Orchard in Cherry Valley, Illinois, and I wanted to save some blackberries for later. We are going on a trip to Europe very soon, so I knew we wouldn't eat them all by our trip, and this way we can have delicious blackberries deep into winter.


I took Alton's steps, and the blackberries are in the freezer right now. I've done this with some blueberries earlier in the summer, and it worked really well. These will be really great in smoothies this fall and winter!