As someone who has grown up from a young age with a large garden, I have been freezing produce for years. I love that this book offers something for beginners and those who have been freezing produce for a while. I love the recipes in this book and am excited to try them in my own home. The photography is beautiful.

I am so happy Crystal Schmidt chose to share all her hard-won experience and tips for using a freezer as a preservation tool. This book is jam-packed with great ideas for reducing food waste, whether you have your own garden or have bought too much produce at the grocery store. It is filled with best practices and delicious recipes. This is a fantastic book!

Title: Freeze Fresh: The Ultimate Guide to Preserving 55 Fruits and Vegetables 🌽 🌶 for Maximum Flavor and Versatility
Author: Crystal Schmidt

Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC

Publication date: July 5, 2022

Review:
This is a beautifully laid out, informative "ultimate guide" for farmers, home gardeners, and anyone with trees in their yard that give you a bounty of avocados, mango, lychee, or in our case guava, calamansi and tangerines. There are also great tips on freezers, organization and recipes that let you use the frozen fruits and vegetables.

If this is how I lived now, instead of in an apartment with an over the refrigerator freezer, this is definitely worth trying. I love this lifestyle of growing food, giving away or preserving the food by canning, dehydrating or now fresh freezing. It is the Mother Earth lifestyle that I have always dreamed of. But then the plethora of insects in Hawaii paired with my very skillful knack at killing plants, as well as the whole empty nest stage of my life means that the reality is not the dream. Still, I like to look at the pictures. I like to look at the recipes. I like to imagine someone I know finding peace in the process of preserving their rhubarb and zoodles for a different season. This book will help you fulfill that dream. For me, it is just wishful wandering into a different world.

From the Publisher:
Capturing the peak flavor of freshly harvested produce and preserving it for year-round eating is easier than ever with Freeze Fresh, the ultimate guide to freezing and enjoying more than 55 popular fruits and vegetables. Author Crystal Schmidt shares her time-tested preparation techniques that ensure color, texture, and flavor are retained in the freezer. From familiar favorites like apples, corn, potatoes, and peas to surprises like lettuce, avocado, and citrus fruit, Schmidt details the best ways to prepare each food for the freezer, including pre-cooking, slicing, blanching, and more. She offers more than 100 recipes that freeze well, such as Blueberry Maple Pancake Sauce, Pickled Sliced Beets, Mango Chutney, and Honey Butter Carrot Mash--as well as delicious ways to cook the frozen food after thawing, including Creamy Parmesan Confetti Corn, Tart Cherry Oatmeal Bars, Broccoli Cheese Soup, and Blueberry-Matcha Latte Smoothie. Home cooks and gardeners alike will love discovering how easy and economical it can be to fill your freezer with produce customized to your own tastes and needs.

My kind of book, as I hate food waste, so if I can get the most use out of my fresh food – I will! Thanks for the tips.

Thank you NetGalley for my complimentary copy in return for my honest review.

This is a truly helpful book, whether you garden, hit the farmers market, or just tend to over-buy at the grocery store. It covers how to select and properly freeze produce, and then make use of the bounty tucked away in your freezer. Clever and helpful!

I was interested to read Freeze Fresh as I feel I don't make the most of my freezer or fresh produce when it is season. Freeze Fresh explains the best way to freeze fruit and vegetables and gives great recipe ideas to use your frozen bounty in. My freezer is a better place for this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read Freeze Fresh.

A fabulous resource that has improved the equality of produce that I am 'throwing' in the freezer. Like many of us, we are trying to save on wasted food by utilising the freezer. This book has opened my eyes to how to get the best out of the quality of produce that is being frozen resulting in excellently preserved and ready to use when needed without the waste.

Freeze Fresh
by Crystal Schmidt
Pub Date: July 19, 2022
Storey Publishing
Thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for the ARC of this book.
This is a great guide to freezing fresh fruits and vegetables. It goes into how to blanch, flash freeze, etc., and how to use the produce once you've frozen it. Lots of photos. There are some recipes to use some of the products. It covers most common garden produce like blueberries, melons, potatoes, greens, herbs, plums, broccoli, etc.
I recommend this book and I am purchasing it for our library. We get questions on this topic a lot and this is a good resource material
5 stars

Freeze Fresh is an informative on freezing produce and is a wonderful resource, not just for anyone who grows their own food, but for any home cook. As pointed out in the start of the book, the techniques can be applied to produce that one buys at the farmers market or grocery store. The instructions were easy to follow, the pictures are helpful and I'm looking forward to using these techniques this summer with my garden produce.

Freeze Fresh is an accessibly and clearly written resource guide to freezing fresh produce along with some recipes curated and written by Crystal Schmidt. Due out 19th July 2022 from Storey, it's 208 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

The included tutorials and recipes show how to select, prepare, and pack produce for preservation by freezing to maximize taste and quality. Essential and helpful equipment lists are included and explained very well. When I first started processing our garden produce, my tendency was to process -every- single fruit/vegetable no matter how misshapen, overripe, squishy, or blemished. I hated to 'waste' (compost) -anything- unnecessarily.The author makes a good case for selecting the best fruits and vegetables to freeze and shows how.

The following chapters include processing and recipes grouped alphabetically from apples to zucchini.

The recipes themselves are easy to read and understand. They include a header bar along with yields and a description. Ingredients are listed bullet point in a sidebar. Measurements are given in imperial (US standard) units only. Preparation instructions are enumerated step by step. Substitutions and alternative preparation or serving information are given in highlighted text boxes throughout.

Photography and food styling are very well done and prep and serving pictures are appealing and appropriate.

Five stars. This is a good addition to the home gardener's and smallholder's resource libraries. It's not a replacement for canning encyclopedias like Ball's Blue Book, but it's very good for specifics and tips for freezing produce with a collection of varied and useful recipes for using frozen fruits and veggies.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

This is a great book for anyone interested in learning how to preserve fruits and vegetables in the freezer. For me, I've always been a little hesitant to can anything because I'm worried I won't properly sterilize everything and will accidentally give my family botulism! I didn't even realize how many foods can be frozen and then "brought back to life" weeks and months later, but this is great to know as I hate throwing away food.

My husband and I are soon upgrading to a large freezer (we're in Europe, but purchasing a big American side-by-side refrigerator/freezer) which is very exciting (!!!) and will mean we'll soon have room to freeze our favorites. I'm already looking forward to strawberry crumble and asparagus soup in winter!

This book is full of beautiful photos and Crystal's personal stories, which I so enjoyed. She teaches you how to freeze just about every fruit and veggie you can imagine and sprinkles in recipes along the way. I now need a physical copy for my kitchen as this will make a fabulous reference book.

This book was awesome! Learned quite a bit on properly freezing and preserving my fruits and veggies!

This book was great! I learned so much. It also really inspired me to start growing some of my fruits, veggies, and herbs. I also realized I have not been utilizing my freezer as much as I should be. I'm excited to freeze some produce and try the recipes in this book.

I grow my own veg and fruit and love to preserve so this book was great…loads of techniques and recipes to try!

I was interested in filling the gaps in my freezing knowledge. Recently, I had surgery and had a need to freeze meals for the family while I recovered. I soon learned there are big gaps from knowing how to freeze bagged corn and freezing meals. This book delivered on filling those gaps!

This is a great guide to freezing fresh fruits and vegetables. The author provides great details about food prep time, freezing, what containers to use, and defrosting our items, cooking time.

I'm a visual learner, so I loved how many pictures were provided with detailed instructions. I better understand what freezes well, what may be better cooked before it is frozen, and how long to defrost items before cooking. The latter bit was what I was struggling to achieve correctly.

I loved that the author provides a recipe section and how to use the food we've frozen. Her instructions use basic language, simple directions, with a quick prep time. This allows us as parents to spend less time in the kitchen, and more time with the family.

Summer is coming. Each year, we try to find fun family activities to keep kids entertained when on summer break. If you haven't gone strawberries or apple picking with your kiddos,mine love it. There are a lot of jobs they can help with once the fruits or vegetables are home. Learning can be fun, and reducing waste is important. These fun memories will reappear when you make a nice fruit pie during the holiday and they helped.

Thanks to Netgalley and Storey Publishing for providing me with an ARC book for an honest review.

Excellent guide for freezing fruit and vegetables. It covers everything from preparation to storage and thawing. There is an A-Z section of produce you can freeze with tips on how to increase their longevity and preserve nutrients. Recipes are also included to demonstrate what you can do with your frozen produce.

"Freeze Fresh" by Crystal Schmidt is a wonderful resource for homesteaders, culinary enthusiasts and anyone interested in reducing food waste (and stretching their grocery budget).

I like how the book is arranged in alphabetic order by the name of the food. It makes it really easy to find the page you need. The recipes are simple, easy to follow and perfect for meal prepping!.

In addition to the food guide and recipes, the book covers numerous topics including :
- how to select food for freezing
- freezing preparation
- types of containers to use
- types of freezers and other helpful kitchen tools and,
- freezer organization

With the price of food on the rise, this book is well worth the investment!

This is such a simple premise but it is delivered in such a friendly, conversational tone, with lots of practical tips and fantastic recipes that you’ll want to either immediately plant something (guilty) or plunder the freezer and start making one of the recipes (guilty again)!

This is one of the few recipe books that honestly made me itch to make something straight away and part of the reason for that is that the author is authentically targeting home cooks. The Ottolenghis of this world make for great aspirational reads and dinner party recipes but it’s the Nigella’s that I return to for the everyday and this book fits right into the same category. Fab.

If you often find yourself having to toss fruits and vegetables (I do!) , this book would be a great help. There is so much information pertaining to not only freezing produce and in what form to freeze them but also how to cook them afterwards. The recipes look so appealing, not to mention the gorgeous photographs spread throughout the book.

Fifty-five popular fruits and vegetables are talked about in detail here, but it seems to me that the info garnered would help us deal with any type of fruits and vegetables.

I have often been impressed with Storey publications, and this one was no exception.

Definitely adding this to my physical shelf, so many freezing options I never knew where there, or lost in today’s society. Recipes to help use the food you’ve frozen. Just a please to read and look forward to adding these item into my kitchen.