How To Freeze Fruit

Using a powerful blender, like the Vita-Mix, frozen fruit will be an amazing addition to your delicious fruit smoothie, but how to freeze fruit properly is a common question. You've made the first step, recognizing that frozen fruit is important. This page will describe the best ways to freeze fruit for your smoothies.

Aside from PEELING your bananas and washing the blueberries (organic, hopefully!), here are a few important tips:

1. Blueberries: Fill up a Ziploc bag, seal it tightly and throw in your freezer. Easy!

2. Bananas: Wait until your bananas are very ripe. In fact, over-ripe bananas make the best, sweetest smoothies, so if your grocer offers a discount on over-ripe bananas, take advantage of it! Peel your bananas and break them into 2 or 3 pieces before putting them in a Ziploc bag, seal the bag tightly and throw in your freezer.

3. Raspberries: Freezing raspberries the proper way involves a lot of freezer space. Lay out your ripe (organic!) raspberries in a single layer, ideally not touching each other on a tray. Place your trays in the freezer and let them freeze for at least 24 hours. After they freeze individually, scrape them off the trays with a spatula and fill Ziploc bags with your pre-frozen raspberries. Now store them in the freezer in the bags.

4. Strawberries: You can follow the instructions for raspberries (above) or just throw them in a Ziploc bag, seal tightly, throw them in the freezer and you're done! Freezing them individually, like raspberries, will make it easy to break them apart when you're making your smoothie. Sometimes group-frozen (in a Ziploc, not individually) strawberries will stick together too much, requiring a knife to cut them up or a violent smash on the counter. One day I was breaking up frozen banana chunks by bashing the Ziploc against my kitchen counter and I cracked the tile! Not a good plan!

5. Greens (kale, spinach, etc.): Wash your greens and make sure you've dried them. (Excess water makes the leaves stick together with the ice, which might not be a big deal, but I like it when the leaves come apart easily instead of mushing together with ice.) Tightly seal them in a Ziploc bag and - you guessed it - throw it in the freezer.

More tips on how to freeze fruit:

- Ideally, keep your fruit in the freezer for 24 hours before making a smoothie. I've found that if they're half frozen, they provide a less-than-ideal consistency. Bananas particularly need to be fully frozen if you want the amazing ice cream consistency that fruit achieves in your powerful smoothie blender. Fully frozen fruit fluffs up more and has a richer texture, while cold or almost-frozen fruit mushes and can taste... sloppy.

- If you buy organic kale, spinach or other leafy greens from your local organic farm, you might find soil and insects in the folds of the leaves. Soak the leaves in a bowl with water covering. The soil will come off, particularly after you soak it and then spin it several times. But some of the little itty bitty insects that sometimes come with my kale just don't seem to want to completely leave. I'll find lots of them in the water after soaking, but, to be honest, I often just leave some of them if they're not completely gone. They won't hurt the family, I forget about them, and no one tastes them. Extra protein!

Enjoy your incredible frozen fruit!