How to preserve and freeze cauliflower

Cauliflower is another vegetable I grew up preserving and freezing with my mom and great grandmother. We recently were gifted a big box of seconds cauliflower from our friends’ farm down the road. We couldn’t eat all the cauliflower fresh before it went bad so we decided to preserve it to eat year round. There are several recipes our family loves that use cauliflower so we figured if we preserve and freeze all this fresh cauliflower then we can use it throughout the year in our favorite recipes.

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How we preserve and freeze cauliflower

Like most vegetables we freeze, we use the standard method of blanching and freezing to preserve cauliflower.

Step 1: Wash the cauliflower and remove any brown spots. Chop the cauliflower into bite size pieces.
Step 2: Boil water in a blanching pot (we have one like this and love it!)
Step 3. Place the cauliflower in the boiling water for three minutes.
Step 4: Remove the cauliflower and immediately put it into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking process.
Step 5: Once the cauliflower is cool, remove it from the water and lay it out in a single layer on an absorbent kitchen towel to dry.
Step 6: Package the cauliflower in freezer bags or we have a vacuum sealer like this one that has been SO helpful in our freezing and preserving! I package the cauliflower in two cup quantities since that works best for our family.
Step 7: Freeze the cauliflower for up to a year. If it is packaged well with little to no moisture it shouldn’t get freezer burnt and still be great to use within a year.

How we use preserved cauliflower

Growing up, we often had our preserved cauliflower served as a vegetable side dish with homemade meatloaf or grilled trout from the local creek. It is a struggle to get my kids to eat plain cauliflower so I’ve found they are more receptive to eating cauliflower if it is mixed into a meal instead of served on the side. One of my favorite recipes to use cauliflower is Cauliflower Pie in the Moosewood Cookbook I wrote about in this post. You can also find the cookbook here.

I recently made Mediterranean Cauliflower Pizza and it was so delicious! This was a recipe in my newest favorite cookbook that I wrote about in this post or you can find the cookbook here. Earlier in the summer I heard several other people rave about making pizza with a cauliflower crust so was curious to try it. We still love our traditional homemade pizza dough but Cauliflower pizza is a tasty treat to mix it up sometimes and also gives us another tasty way to sneak veggies into the kids’ meals!