How to freeze zucchini

Step by step instructions on how to freeze zucchini – a way to deal with at least a small portion of the kilos from the garden!

If you have ever grown zucchini and been able to keep up with it, I’d like to hear about it. If you have 20 kids, it doesn’t count. We are just lucky we have pigs for when we get the inevitable “left it to grow for 30 minutes too long and now I have a marrow” situation!

We had 2 zucchini plants this year. And we grew approximately 60,000 zucchinis. Now I’m not great at maths, but I’m pretty sure if I ate all that zucchini I would turn into a zucchini.

So after eating fried zucchini, barbequed zucchini, boiled zucchini, zucchini with eggs, zucchini loaf I was ready to do something else with it and what is my go to when it comes to preserving extra food? Freeze it of course! I sliced some up to freeze so that we could have them all winter – as they are so full of water though I’m not sure how they will go – I’ll let you know!

But something I know that works for sure is to grate it and freeze it. Then you have zucchini that you can pull out of the freezer and use in just about anything over winter. I particularly like it in zucchini loaf or muffins but I’m sure you could throw it in a stirfry too.

Chop of the ends and grate away until you have a mountain of the stuff.

This step is SUPER IMPORTANT. Seriously, don’t miss it out. All zucchini, especially if you are using monsters that have been left in the garden about 5 days longer than they should have been, are mostly made up of water. You’ll be able to tell with the grated zucchini that there is a LOT of liquid. So you squeeze it out.

Lay out a clean tea towel.

Put a pile of grated zucchini in the middle

And wrap it up tight.

Now you will have your arm work out for the day. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze until you can’t squeeze anymore. Don’t be scared of hurting the zucchini – it’ll be fine. Be as rough as you like. But seriously, squeeze the heck out of it.

Look how much water came out of this little bunch. You don’t wanna be freezing that – way too watery.

Once you have got as much liquid out as you can, measure it into portions (I use 1 or 2 cups) and put in labeled ziplock bags to go in the freezer.

Now we will be sick of zucchini all year round instead of just in summer!