Really good primer on not wasting food—how to freeze every kind of veggie or fruit. Really helpful for new cooks or college kids but the recipes are great for even advanced cooks. It made me think of new and better ways to use frozen produce.

The first main section gets into the basics of freezing foods, and also covers some general tips. Schmidt covers essential freezing techniques like steam blanching and flash-freezing, freezing containers, and several helpful tools and supplies.

The next section has chapters for each fruit or vegetable, in alphabetical order from Apples to Zucchini. For each food there are instructions for freezing and thawing, and several different recipes to try with the that specific fruit/vegetable.

Overall, I liked this book. There are many different recipes to try, and I will certainly be freezing a bunch of fruits now that I’m familiar with these techniques.

I enjoy growing fresh food, but invariably, I grow more than I need or I come across a bulk sale and have to pass it by because I couldn’t possibly use it in time before it went bad. Preserving the extras to have for later makes sense, but I am not one for canning in a heated kitchen. I’ve tried freezing our produce, but with poor results when it comes out. Then I spotted Freeze Fresh and got excited that it might be a good resource to show me where I went wrong and give me even more ideas for what, how, and later what to make with it.

Freeze Fresh begins with an intro to the author and then the advantages of freezing as a method of preservation. She goes into the history and science behind freezing (no worries, this section is short). Then the essential techniques and what supplies are needed. Right away, I realized that I would not be able to go whole hog like the author because, at the present, I only have a small freezer attached to my refrigerator and she speaks of having a separate one dedicated to freezer preservation (in fact she has three). A chest freezer is on my ‘someday’ wish list so I was still very much interested in learning what she had to say.

Then there were good tips for freezing like how to cut up the veggies and fruits, how to array them on pans to have them freeze evenly, how to defrost properly, and even how to get frozen foods back to the consistency needed for some cooking projects like the filling for pies. I was startled to learn that one can freeze in glass containers provided safety precautions are taken. I liked the frugal tips like saving the vegetable scraps, like tips, skins, etc. leftover from cutting them up in a freezer bag to later use in veggie broth rather than tossing or composting them.
The majority of the book is details about the freezing of individual fruits and veggies. I liked being able to flip to the ones I personally grow and chose to read those rather than straight through the sections.
I should mention that the very first section talks about general uses for large groups of fruits and veggies before getting into the individual ones. Her first example is using fruits to make jam that is frozen which is a different method to typical freezer jam which has more added sugar. Now, we’re talking! Healthier and easier. This is where she gives the prepping and freezing technique and shares her recipes that correspond. She then moves on to creating veggie combo packages like cauliflower, broccoli and carrots or making up green juice cubes for smoothies.
The individual fruit and veggie sections not only share about how to prep and freeze the raw produce, but freezing things like juice, sauce, or butters derived from them. I should also mention that these sections include fresh grown herbs and spices including herbal blends ready to go into certain cooking projects to save time later. My eyebrow went up about freezing lettuce, but apparently it’s great in smoothies and soups later. Each section there are her recipes for using the frozen produce. Yum!

In summary, Crystal Schmidt’s Freeze Fresh book gave me confidence to try this preservation method again for better results and made me realize that there were more products that could be frozen than I had even imagined. Her tips and recipes are the bonus that just made it even better. Definitely a food resource I can recommend.

Freeze Fresh is an amazing book with everything you would need to get started on your food preservation journey. The author begins with a little history about growing your own food and how people preserved it in the past. I love to begin a book like this with a look at how it started and what has changed since, it makes me so grateful for modern practices! In the first half of the book we find different techniques showing how to freeze food for the best quality when defrosted. So much detailed information is shared on how to prevent freezer burn, what containers to use, helpful tools that will make the process easier for you. I learned SO much in these sections and the information was presented in a way that was not overwhelming and it was very easy to understand. I can’t wait to put what I have learned to use.

Once we get through all the tools/techniques, there is the section on “Freezing Produce From A-Z” which literally walks you through how to freeze every kind of produce you can imagine in multiple ways. This is a complete game changer for me! I have never even thought about trying some of the options our author gives us in this book. We then get to the last section of the book which is recipes that can be frozen, and they all look delicious!

What I appreciated most about this book is that the information is given in a way that is not overwhelming, it's exciting and organized, and makes me really believe I will be able to do all the things listed in this book. I am so excited to try out some of these new techniques I have read about. There are pictures all throughout the book that make it colorful and lively, and break up reading so much text. The pictures also provide an example of what the author is teaching in that section.

What a wonderful resource to anyone who is lucky enough to pick up this book, I will be buying some for friends and family as I know anyone who receives it will enjoy it!

Freeze Fresh is a wonderful resource to use while using the fresh foods that are available during our summer. I like freezing fresh fruit much better than canning, so I was excited to add this to my library. Who knew that there were so many things to know to keep your food so much fresher! I enjoyed the history of freezers, how to blanch, and how best to freeze my veggies and fruit, as well as the recipes included. This is a great book to add to your kitchen this summer!
Thank you to NetGalley and Storey Publishing for this ARC. I happily endorse this book.

FINALLY! This book is incredibly helpful especially if you have a CSA share or your own garden and find yourself with an excess of fruits/veggies.

At first I thought it was more an individual ingredient manual to understand how to get the best out of items and understand the best way to defrost and guidance on shelf lives. Don't get me wrong that is all packed in, but there is so much more too... it is absolutely packed with yummy recipes and tips on what to do with things like seeds that you might normally throw away as well as 'how to's' so it has made me more resourceful and a better cook too! It's thorough and has about 200 pages and plenty of photos for those tasty recipe pages too. This book would make a great gift and thinking of getting a copy for a new home gift for a friend

Nonfiction. This book is a must-have for those who are faced with an abundance of produce from a garden or farmer's market. This takes a food by food approach of how to freeze produce to preserve freshness. It discusses some tools and techniques at the beginning, but the individualized section for each food makes up the bulk of the book. I requested my library purchase it and also pre-ordered a copy for myself!

Thank you to NetGalley and Storey Publishing for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.

I really try to review cookbooks by cooking at least 1 thing out of the book, and then judging the ease of the cookbook based on that. I don't think it is fair to judge a cookbook on its theoretical merits - how easy it is to read, how many different types of recipes there are, what kinds of ingredients are needed, etc. Because I don't cook as much as I would like, I try to give some leniancy due to this as well, since people who cook more might have an easier time, but I feel that cookbooks should have at least some all-levels friendly recipes. That is the basic mindset for me writing this review.

I requested this book because I really wanted to find ways to use more fruits and vegetables without them going bad - since it gets really expensive to buy produce and it can be cheaper to buy in bulk, but then it can go bad before I use it. Again, not necessarily the best cook, and my lifestyle isn't always conducive to cooking meals every day. Unfortunately the aspect of this cookbook that was telling me how to freeze/store produce was mostly things I already knew/could easily look up, so that wasn't super helpful compared to what I was expecting. What I did get from this cookbook was a lot of recipes on how to prepare ingredients into things, to then freeze, to then pull out and cook with, or to take things and freeze them, and then pull them out and cook with them and have them ready to eat. This made making a recipe really hard because it was a 2-day process minimum if I wanted to try making a recipe so that things could freeze, and I had to find something I wanted to cook more than just trying to freeze produce.

I ended up trying to make the pizza sauce recipe, and the biggest issue I had was that it called for 12 cups of deseeded cherry tomatoes. Do you have any idea how many tomatoes that is? I didn't. I did learn how to deseed tomatoes, and I learned that I could replace cherry tomatoes with paste tomatoes for this recipe, but then I was on my own. I spent forever trying to look up how many tomatoes I needed to buy, what kind of tomatoes paste tomatoes were, and then realized that I had to roast the tomatoes for 90 minutes after deseeding them before I could even start the next part of the process. I learned that paste tomatoes are another name for Roma tomatoes, and so I bought four large Roma tomatoes based on my best conversion, and that ended up making 1/12 of the recipe, which meant I had to 12th everything else - which I couldn't do since part of it called for a teaspoon of things, which is incredibly hard to divide, so I just measured with my heart. Once the sauce was ready it was supposed to sit overnight in the fridge before freezing, which would then be used for cooking.

Moral of the story is that conversions in this book are incredibly difficult, and there wasn't really a good guide for that. This is not necessarily the most user-friendly book when it comes to preparing things unless you have a lot of time and are preparing things for far in advance and have a lot of produce on hand. While the pizza sauce turned out delicious and we all enjoyed it, it was 3 hours worth of work to make and then we didn't even get to eat it until the next day, and it barely made enough for 3 slices of matzah pizza. I don't know if I did something wrong, but that is a different issue. I think this is a great book for people who have a lot more skills than I do, and maybe some day when I have more time I will be able to use this book in a lot better ways.

It is very useful! It is written by a US author so words and names are very American, but that is easily overcome, and I do like that the freezing advice is separate to the recipes. If you can cope with American names and cook with 'cups' of ingredients, then this book is worth having.

With this book you get much more than the title promises. Apart from the advice on freezing 55 different fruits and vegetables (and herbs, if that is a separate category), there are also quite a few recipes plus a lot of other practical advice. For example, there's a section on buying a freezer - pros and cons of chest freezer vs fridge freezer - and suggestions on how to pack the freezer, depending on which style you opt for. Various techniques like flash freezing and blanching are described in a way even a novice could easily follow.

This book would make a great resource for someone starting out on using freezing as a way of living more sustainably and cheaply, whether growing their own produce or just shopping seasonally or in bulk.

Immense Gratitude to #NetGalley for an e-book ARC in exchange for an honest review

Crystal Schmidt's Freeze Fresh could be revolutionary for those of us that are always looking to keep what grows in our garden through the year. In addition, it clearly defines all of the techniques, tools, and thought that went into the creation of this book. For each food item there is usually one if not two recipes on how to freeze that fruit or vegetable. I am excited to share this book with you. I plan to buy a few copies to send to friends as a gift. So many recipes to attempt. I hope those of you that have gardens or buy fresh fruit or vegetables will give this a read and try it out.

Freeze Fresh is a common sense surprise for those of us that have never really taken the time to find the proper way to freeze fresh food. Unfortunately, grocery stores have made it all to easy to buy and toss in the freezer with out much forethought. I can't wait to put these methods into action. There are many tips and recipes that look easy enough to try.

I really learned a lot from this book, I freeze a lot of fresh fruit for smoothies but not the proper way as this book lays out. Looking forward to having less waste due to my previous lack of knowledge regarding preserving food.

I also enjoyed the foreword by Eve Kilcher, from the tv series, Alaska The Last Frontier. I have enjoyed watching her on the series in her subsistence lifestyle with her family.

This book covers the basics of preserving various fruit and vegetable in your freezer. It covers basic tools you will need, as well as some simple techniques to help the food last longer in your freezer so you can enjoy like-fresh produce all year round.

After the how-to portion it includes an extensive A-Z of various fruits and vegetables you can freeze, including different uses for each item and the specific prep and steps needed depending on what you are doing. Then it includes some recipes for using the frozen item in.

The book contains lots of beautiful photos and more recipes than I thought...originally I thought this was just going to be a how-to on freezing, but it is so much more than that!

Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A well-written book which gives lots of good tips on freezing. I grow a lot of vegetables so this book was very helpful. Recommended.

Freeze Fresh by Crystal Schmidt
Release Date: 7/5/22

This was beyond a useful book! I never realized that there was more to freezing things than just sticking it in the freezer and this book broke down different techniques to freeze different fruits and veggies as well as the best containers to store them in in the freezer. I garden a lot so I've been using this book to freeze some of the spring veggies and fruits that I've had a surplus of. I also found myself with a large amount of fruit at my house that my family and I ended up freezing. The most interesting parts of this book for me though were the recipes that the author has for you to either freeze or use the frozen fruit and veggies in. There are now a good amount of shamrock shaped Honey Butter Carrot Mash in my freezer (the only good sized silicone mold I have is shamrock shaped) as well as a few containers of Salty Caramel Pear Butter. I'm looking forward to using this book as a reference for how to best freeze the summer veggies from my garden and I'm so thankful for the information available in it!

Thank you to NetGalley and Storey Publishing for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This book is terrific resource if you don’t want to can foods the old fashion way but still want to preserve your garden bounty.
Ms. Schmidt covers everything here. What freezer to use …. Your freezer on fridge is not the best…. Tips to organize that freezer.
Do you need to blanch or no? What container, bag or jar you might prefer to use.
She gives a history of frozen foods.
And she covers the food you can expect back from your effort’s and then gives recipes to go with each fruit and vegetable. A to Z.
Well organized , very well explained. And some excellent pictures of the finished products.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me this ARC

What a unique and interesting book! I learned so much. The sheer variety of ways that food can be preserved is amazing. Shredding!? Who knew! Publication at the peak of fresh fruit and veg season is perfect for people wanting to preserve the bounty of their gardens beyond the traditional canning method. My freezer will be simply bursting with fresh frozen goodness this fall and winter.

Thank you, Netgalley and the author/publisher, for the opportunity to read and review an advanced reader's copy of this book. This in no way affects my review, all opinions are my own.

Run and buy this book when it is released!!!! This book is fantastic for doomsday preppers but also for those who in these times of inflation and food shortages due to the pandemic and the war in the Ukraine want to fill their freezers. The author provides an easy-to-understand 101 of the methods to freeze, the types of freezers with the pros and cons, the ways to unthaw properly, etc. And then, OMG, the recipes in this book!!!!! Those were all things my picky eaters (aka kids and husband) enjoy. The author made me want to get up and reorganize my chest freezer, for which, by the way, she describes her system and little hacks to keep her freezer organized.

I simply love this book. The advice and inspiration is great. The recipes could be used with both fresh and frozen produce. I have a similar book about storing produce but this is even better! I will make use of it time and time again. Thank you!