Frozen gooseberries: ways to freeze berries for the winter in the freezer

Preparing berries for freezing

The collected gooseberries should first be sorted and peeled. You can cut off the sepals and remaining stalks with a knife or ordinary kitchen scissors. The second option will help you cope with this task much faster.

Also, before freezing, it is necessary to get rid of spoiled berries or those that have been affected by powdery mildew.

The sorted gooseberries should be rinsed in cool water, drained in a colander, and then spread out on paper towels. The fruits should be completely dry, so the washed crop can be blotted with a paper towel and on top.

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Methods for freezing gooseberries

How to freeze gooseberries with whole berries

Washed and thoroughly dried berries are laid out on trays or in a special freezer container designed for freezing small products, and placed in the freezer for a couple of hours. During this time, the berries will set and can be poured into a bag without worrying about them sticking together later.

If the gooseberries have dried well, then the pre-freezing procedure can be omitted and the berries can be immediately placed into portioned bags.

Freezing gooseberries sprinkled with sugar

Everything is simple here too. Pure berries are sprinkled with sugar, mixed and placed in containers or bags. The amount of sugar depends on the type of gooseberry. Sweet varieties can only be lightly sprinkled with sugar, while sour varieties must be generously flavored with granulated sugar.

How to freeze gooseberries in sugar syrup

This method is more suitable for gooseberry varieties with thin skins or slightly overripe berries.

First of all, you need to cook the syrup from sugar and water in a ratio of 1:2. The hot syrup is cooled first at room temperature and then in the refrigerator. It must be cool before freezing.

The berries are placed in small containers and filled with syrup. It is advisable that the gooseberries are completely covered with liquid.

Important: You need to leave about 1-2 centimeters from the top of the container so that the syrup, expanding when freezing, does not leak out.

Freezing gooseberries as puree

It is better to freeze soft gooseberries by making a puree from them. To do this, they are punched with a blender or chopped in a meat grinder. Sugar is added to taste. If you are freezing puree for small children, then it is better not to put sugar in the preparation.

The puree is placed in plastic cups or ice trays and frozen in this form in the freezer for 24 hours. Then the ice cubes are removed from the molds and put into bags, and the cups are tightly wrapped with cling film.

See the video from the channel “Everything will be fine!” — How to freeze berries correctly?

Shelf life of frozen gooseberries in the freezer

Gooseberries frozen by any method must be signed. If you can still distinguish green varieties when frozen from other berries, then blue and black ones can easily be confused, for example, with black currants or chokeberries.

The shelf life of gooseberry preparations in the freezer is 8-10 months at a temperature of -18ºC.