DIY Frozen Sweet Corn: Fresh-Picked Taste All Year Long

It's harvest time at our house.  We have been picking fresh squash, tomatoes, chard, beets, green beans, grapes, nectarines, apples, cucumbers, and corn.   We've had a LOT of fresh fruits and vegetables for lunches and dinners.  The trick is what to do with all the excess.  For us that means preserving excess food through canning, juicing, drying, and freezing.

Sweet corn, for instance, is ambrosial when it's fresh.  We get the water boiling first, pick it quick, run it into the house and drop it immediately into the pot.  It's also full of digestible fiber and nutrients.  1 cup of fresh sweet corn kernels (about 1 large ear) has 4 grams of fiber, plus it’s rich in vitamin B1, vitamin B5, vitamin C, phosphorus, manganese, folate, beta cryptoxanthin, lutein, and zeaxanthin.  The health benefits resulting from those nutrients include:

• Keeping Your Eyes Healthy - zeaxanthin, folate, and beta carotene can have a protective effect against age-related eye diseases such as macular degeneration
• Cardiovascular Health - folate lowers the homocysteine levels in the body
• Cancer Prevention - the greater amount of beta cryptoxanthin that is consumed, the lower the prevalence of lung cancer development
• Mental Accuity - thiamine is an essential nutrient required for brain cell and cognitive function

You can buy canned corn and it's not bad, or frozen corn which is better, but homemade frozen sweet corn, picked at its prime and processed immediately is the BEST!  By processing immediately you capture the amazing flavors that exist only in that brief moment when the corn is just right.  It's a flavor that many urbanites have never tasted, but those tender tantalizing kernels are worth the trouble to seek out truly fresh corn.

Here is how to freeze your own corn for that fresh-picked taste all year long:

The secret to preserving that amazing flavor is blanching.  Blanching is a cooking process wherein the food substance, usually a vegetable or fruit, is plunged into boiling water, removed after a brief, timed interval, and finally plunged into iced water or placed under cold running water (shocked) to halt the cooking process.  Blanching corn inactivates the enzymes that quickly turn tender kernels to tough seeds.  Blanching also cleans off surface dirt and organisms, brightens the color, reduces enzyme activity that cause color and flavor changes, removes air and softens the texture so vegetables are easier to pack into containers.

To blanch corn, bring one gallon of water to a boil in a large pot with a basket insert and a lid. Put the corn in the blanching basket, and lower into boiling water. Cover with a lid. Bring the water back to a boil.  You are counting blanching time as soon as the water returns to a boil.

Blanch whole kernel corn for 4 minutes. Cool promptly by placing ears of corn in ice water. Drain and cut kernels from cob at 2/3 of their depth (do not scrape cob).

To pack for freezing, put the corn into plastic freezer bags, squeeze out air, seal, label and freeze. Corn should be packaged in amounts that can be used in one meal.

When freezing corn, freeze no more than 2 to 3 pounds per cubic foot of freezer capacity in a 24 hour period. This enables the freezer to freeze the food rapidly enough that food spoilage and/or food borne illness microorganisms will not have time to grow.