Apples are available in most places all year round, although if you’d like to freeze them, feel free to do it. When it comes to freezing apples, there are a few methods that are pretty popular. Read the rest of the article to learn about them!
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How to freeze apples?
What you need to know
Freezing changes the texture of apple (as it does to most other fruit and veggies) and therefore freezing apples in order to eat them raw in the future isn’t a good idea. Freezing is recommended only if you plan to use apples in a cooked or baked dish (pies, cakes, etc.). If that’s the case, feel free to freeze this tasty fruit. There are a couple of ways of doing that, let’s go over each of them.
Freezing sliced apples
First, you need to prepare all the apples you want to freeze. Start by washing them under running water, peeling, cutting out the core. Now they’re ready to be sliced in shapes and sizes of your desire. Consider what you’ll do with the apples later when slicing, so you’ll be able to use those slices directly from the freezer, without any additional work.
One thing to remember – there’s an enzyme in apples that causes them to brown when they are frozen and thawed. Good news is – you can suppress it and there’s a couple of ways of doing that. The easiest way is to submerge those slices in a lemon juice solution or salt water solution ( 2 tbsp. of salt per 1 gallon of water) for some time. Another way is to steam the slices for 2 minutes. Either way, that will make the slices look pretty much normal, instead of brownish (that’s not an appealing color when it comes to apples).
If you’d like to be able to scoop as many apple slices as you need at a time from a freezer bag they’re in, there’s one more thing before packaging to do – pre-freezing. That’s a fairly simple process. First, you need to take a cookie sheet and line it with parchment paper if you wish. Then it’s time to transfer prepared apple slices onto the cookie sheet in a way that they won’t touch one another. Once done, put the cookie sheet into the freezer and keep it in there until the slices have frozen. Once frozen, take the cookie sheet out of the freezer. Apples slices are now ready to be packed for the long-term. Please note that pre-freezing is optional, but if you won’t do it, slices will glue to each other in the freezer bag and in most cases you’ll have to use them all at once.
When it comes to packing, it’s quite simple. Take the sliced apple pieces (either pre-frozen or not) and transfer them into a freezer bag. Squeeze all the air from the bag, seal it, label it and transfer into the freezer. They can be stored there for about a year, although the earlier you’ll use them, the better their quality will be. If freezing for a long time (e.g. about a year), consider double-wrapping the fruit pieces.
Freezing whole apples
This method requires almost no work at all. You start by washing apples under running water. If you’d like to put few apples into one freezer bag but also be able to easily scoop only one of them at a time, follow the pre-freezing process described earlier, that will do the trick. Alternatively, you can wrap each apple with aluminum or freezer wrap individually. Now you just transfer those apples into a freezer bag, remove as much air as possible from it, seal the bag, label it and put into the freezer. Done.
Freezing sliced apples in syrup
There’s one more method of freezing apples and it’s quite popular among people who would like to use those apples in fruit cocktails and similar treats. First – do the prep just like in the freezing sliced apples method. Now it’s time to prepare the solution in which you’ll submerge apple slices. It’s a 40% (2 measures of syrup per 3 measures of water) to 50% (1 measure of syrup per 1 measure of water) syrup solution. If you’d like the apples to not turn brownish, follow the methods described earlier or simply add half teaspoon of ascorbic acid per quart of syrup solution.
Now it’s time to dip apples in syrup. Prepare a container and pour some syrup solution into it. Make sure it covers the bottom of the container. Now add apple slices and cover them with the solution after you’ve added all of them. Make sure to leave some head-space in the container. Now you just need to seal the container tightly and put it into the freezer, where it can be stored for about a year with good results.
Summary
As you can see there are a couple of ways one can freeze apples. I suggest testing each way to find which one works the best for your needs and then using it as your default. Hope this short article helped you with freezing apples.
