Freezing fruit for smoothies

You probably have a little booklet that came with your fridge / freezer that tells you how to freeze all sorts of different fruit and vegetables. But I bet it doesn’t have these tips in it! You see, I’m all for the quick and easy solution, and when faced with a surplus of feijoas or bananas, the truth is I’m just not going to spend hours prepping them. But these quick and easy methods work!

For other fruits, use the methods in the booklet.

See my post on storing ginger and turmeric in the freezer.

Feijoas

This tip was originally shared with you in my Feijoa Smoothie post, but it never hurts to repeat a good tip.

For a few weeks every summer, anyone in New Zealand with a feijoa tree has more of them than they know what to do with, including members of our family. So we regularly bring home way more than we can eat before they go off.

We used to faff about peeling, chopping and freezing them. But we’ve found an EASIER way to store them for winter. Just throw a bag of them whole into the freezer. Yes, really that simple. You can’t defrost them and eat them like you would a fresh one, as the texture isn’t that great. But they’re excellent for smoothies, or also to spice up an apple crumble or pudding.

Just take a couple of frozen feijoas out of the freezer and put them in a bowl of hot water for about two minutes. The green outer skin can be easily peeled off using a knife or peeler, and the still frozen inner flesh can be chopped up with a sharp knife.

Use them up before the next year’s glut appears, though. I don’t think they’d keep for much more than a year.

Bananas

It works even better to freeze bananas, if you have more than you can use before they go brown.

We’ve tried three different ways of freezing bananas. Two of them work.

You can peel them, slice them, and freeze them on a tray. Then, as soon as they’re frozen, take them off the tray and put them into a ziplock bag and squeeze out the air. They can be thrown into a smoothie, or used to make instant ice cream, from frozen. No need to defrost.

But it’s way easier to just peel them and put them whole (or halved) into a ziplock bag, and into the freezer. When you want to use them, you don’t need to defrost them, just cut them up frozen and fling them into the blender or food processor. All good.

They won’t keep very long though – they start to go brown even frozen. But they should be good for a couple of months.

The way that doesn’t work as well? Doing what does work with the feijoas, freezing them with the peel on. You would need to wait for them to defrost before being able to peel them, and I’m just not that patient.