Our Homegrown POTATOES are Going in the FREEZER!

hi everybody welcome to living traditions homestead well we're back in the kitchen again today doing some more preserving we've had a fantastic garden this year the tomatoes are all done and i'm done preserving what we need for the next year for tomatoes so we have preserved a year's worth of diced tomatoes tomato juice tomato sauce salsa ketchup and barbecue sauce and that is just about it that's all i want to see for tomatoes again until another year from now but i'm feeling so blessed about how abundant our harvest has been how blessed we are to have so much food saved up for the next year so things are kind of winding down in the garden which has allowed me to refocus on what i need to still preserve before winter comes now earlier in the summer we harvested our potatoes we harvested 93 pounds of tomatoes which is not one year supply but it's a pretty good amount for us i'm pleased with that initially i did a bunch of canning of our potatoes you can see some of the jars here potatoes here for us in the missouri ozark they don't do well long-term just you know like potatoes in a root cellar or in a cold storage they just get soft and they just don't last really well just out like this or in a cellar so we need to do something with them i've decided not to can any more of the potatoes i've decided to go ahead and do some different freezing projects with the remainder of our potatoes now we've eaten a lot of them i've also froze some already all we have left is in this half of a bushel basket and i'm hoping to get a good chunk of these processed and into the freezer today so i thought to bring you along maybe you'd like to learn how to preserve some of your potatoes in the freezer now you may notice that my voice sounds a little bit strange last week was the first week of school and wouldn't you know it one of the girls brought home a cold and so i have a cold i'm actually feeling pretty good i think i sound worse than i feel but i am doing my best to take care of myself along with getting some work done around here on the homestead so thank you for prayers and for your concern because i know a lot of you watch out for me and you're concerned i appreciate that but i'm doing fine so i am going to get set up for the first potato project that we're going to work on today well the first thing we are starting off with today is to make o'brien potatoes for the freezer now o'brien potatoes are really pieces of potato mixed with onion and pepper i use o'brien potatoes to make my special creamy cheesy potato bake normally i make those for special occasions but i may break them out a couple more times a year so i probably make that maybe four or five times a year even though i can easily and relatively inexpensively buy o'brien potatoes from the grocery store in the freezer section i have all of that ingredients from the garden right now so it makes a lot of sense for me to just use our home-grown ingredients and get them in the freezer for the few times a year that i make that dish i have weighed out about two pounds of potatoes the first thing we're going to do is dice these potatoes and then we're going to blanch them i have my blanching pot all set up it's heating on the stove and the reason you blanch potatoes and really most other vegetables before you put them in the freezer is it stops the enzymes that naturally occur within those fresh veggies it stops them from working even in the freezer you'd think oh once you put something in the freezer all those enzymes won't continue working well they do those enzymes can affect the color and the texture of your end product after you cook them after you pull them out of the freezer so these potatoes we're going to chop up and then we're going to blanch them to get them ready for the freezer the o'brien potatoes that you get from the store in the freezer section the potatoes are about a half an inch by half inch and so that's what i'm trying to do with these potatoes is to make those pieces about the same that way the cooking time is very similar between what i get at the grocery store and what i'm making at home the nice thing about doing your own potatoes though is that you don't have to peel them if you don't want to if you want them peeled go ahead and peel them but i i don't really like to spend all that time peeling the potatoes and then all that fiber is still in our meal so all of these potatoes i'm just going to chop up in these half inch squares and i'm going to put them in a pasta basket like this and we'll use this basket in the pot there i have the two pounds of diced potatoes in my pasta basket this is actually the perfect amount for me to blanch probably the most i would want in one of these pots so now that my pot of water is boiling we're going to go over here and blanch these potatoes so the blanching process is really just like par boiling or pre-cooking but really you're not cooking it all the way you're just kind of half cooking it and the length of time that you cook the vegetables really depends on how big the pieces are how thick they are because these potato pieces are really pretty small we're only going to boil them for about two minutes when you're blanching you put your vegetables in and once the water comes back up to a boil that's when you set your timer so we'll put these potatoes in i'm going to cover them back up and every couple minutes i'm going to look underneath there to see if they're boiling and once they're boiling i'll just set a timer for two minutes and then i'll take them out and put them in some cold water to stop cooking let's just give them a quick stir not boiling yet oh now they're boiling i'm gonna set my timer for two minutes now if this starts boiling too much then i'll just take off the lid for the remainder of the cooking time just so it doesn't boil over it is potatoes after all there's a lot of starch in there so sometimes that can make a lot of bubbles and they'll kind of boil over so we'll just watch that our two minutes is up turn that off and then we're going to take them out of here and put them in the cold water now you can use ice water if you'd like to i never have enough ice on hand and the small amount that i do have on hand i want for a cold ice water so i just put these in cold water and they cool down in just a couple of minutes okay these are nice and cool i'm just gonna put them in the sink and let them drain really well while i get our other ingredients ready now you'll remember that i said o'brien potatoes are potatoes onion and pepper so i'm going to dice up one pepper a sweet pepper doesn't have to be green it doesn't have to be a certain color i'm actually using one of our red roasting peppers this is called aj barski it's actually a red roasting pepper it's amazing but i don't have a bell pepper in the house and it's raining so i don't want to go into the garden and this will taste just fabulous so i'm going to dice this up and get this ready this pepper is absolutely gorgeous and it has a lot of seeds so i'm going to be saving these seeds drying them so that i can use them next year so like i said we're just going to dice this pepper into small pieces and get it ready to go with those potatoes the other beautiful thing about making your own home-grown and frozen o'brien potatoes is that you can choose how many peppers and how many onions go in maybe when you buy them from the store you think oh there just are not enough peppers in here or not enough onions or maybe you would like less this way it's 100 up to you just look at how gorgeous and meaty these pieces are oh i love these peppers okay same thing goes with the onion we're going to use one whole onion it's probably a medium onion i would say [Music] we're just going to do the same thing we're going to dice it up oh no she's crying she's crying from the onions that's a strong one okay the onions and the peppers are all set it's just time to put it all together okay i'm using a gallon sized freezer bag i'm gonna grab my potatoes we're just gonna dump them in hopefully it's as easy as that sounds yep dump them in there we're gonna put the peppers right on top and the onions just put those right on top of the peppers now if you want to mix these up you can do that but i don't think it's necessary i'm just going to try to get as much of the air out of here as possible i'm going to label these with a marker [Music] and i'm going to put them in the freezer just like this because i'm going to be using them just like this the whole bag at one time i'm not worried about them freezing in a big clump i'll just bring them out the night before or thumb out in the refrigerator 24 hours before i need to use them and they will be perfect these are going right in the freezer this is for one gigantic recipe of my cheesy creamy potatoes i am ready to start our second potato project now the o'brien potatoes that i put in the freezer i actually already have five bags of them so that's my sixth bag i'll have six meals worth of o'brien potatoes in the freezer now you may have caught that i didn't blanch the onions or the peppers and you could have done that but i just don't think that there's a huge difference they're going to get cooked down anyway and so that's why i didn't blanch those but the potatoes the consistency of them and the color will really be yucky if we didn't go ahead and blanch them okay so our next potato project we're going to be doing french fries for the freezer now we have invested in a nice french fry cutter this is actually a commercial grade french fry cutter and we bought that because we planned to do this quite often from now on we have had a less expensive or lower quality french fry cutter in the past and actually broke we tried to use it broken but it was very frustrating so we did invest in a nice restaurant grade french fry cutter and we will put one in our amazon shop if you want to take a look so this makes things really easy this french fry cutter now i do want to tell you that i'm going to do quite a few of them before i start blanching them in the waiting process potatoes can start turning brown on the surface so an easy way to prevent that is to just keep them in a bowl of cold water so i have put cold water in this big bowl and as i cut them into the french fries i'll just put them in the cold water until we're ready to put them in the blanching basket and everything will be just hunky-dory okay so we are going to move these potatoes over we don't have giant potatoes left because we've eaten most of them for baking we've picked through them so i've done my best to find the best sized ones bring this over here um suction cup it bring it over here so you guys can see what i'm doing press down on the suction cup feet put your potato down in here push that toward the end of the potato and push out and it should fly out with all of the french fries cut up look at how fancy and handy that is let me show you that again it's so good actually that was the very first time i've ever used that it is super slick and way better than the cheapo one we had okay let me show you guys up close how this works so put the potato in and push the handle look at how easy that was and these potato pieces are fabulous look at the blade is um 3 8 inch holes that it makes or little squares so that is just perfect this is just so fun isn't that good that's what my grandma would say in that good so let's just keep going with this a little bit you know in situations like this i often say to myself do i really need this gadget do i really need another gadget for the kitchen yes i do i need this gadget because are you kidding me how long would it take to chop all of these potatoes in french fries these will be french fries from our garden the way we want them cooked if we want them fried we can fry them which we don't normally do we want to bake them we can bake them which is what we normally do and this is fun okay now i've got a nice pile i'm gonna put them in my bowl so they don't start turning brown oh you guys we have sweet potatoes coming out of the ground soon we haven't harvested them gonna be doing this well i was having so much fun that i got a second bowl and did more fries so now i'm heating up the water again once that comes to a boil we'll start blanching these french fries and getting them ready for the freezer [Applause] put those in there now because these are also very thin we're only gonna let these blanch for about two or three minutes we're just partially cooking them before they go into the freezer [Music] well i've gotten through all the fries this is the last batch here and i'm putting these also in a gallon freezer bag because for the most part we're just going to be using these like all in one meal so this will be one meal of fries this one you know what i mean so i'm not worried if they're stuck together because i'll thaw them out before we use them i know in the grocery store when you buy french fries you know they're frozen but in this case i don't mind thawing them out and then they'll cook faster okay but if you don't like this idea and you don't like that they're going to be all clumped together or if you want to be able to cook them while they're still frozen you can what's called flash freeze them so i put down a piece of parchment paper on a baking pan and i put these fries relatively in a single layer this is one batch uh they'll probably they would probably do better if they were in a single layer but i had too much so so you could then put these in the freezer just like this until they freeze all the way and then you would break them up quickly break them up and put them in a bag and then they'll be a lot more loose so if you wanted a bigger quantity in one bag and then you just dump some out to use them you could do that but this is the way i'm gonna do it feel free to do it this way okay there is one more project that i'm gonna do with these potatoes i'm gonna use most of the rest of them i think we'll keep some out to use still fresh while they're still good but that will be the third potato project and we'll basically um get rid of all the potatoes that we grew well preserve all of the potatoes that we grew um and that will be awesome and then i can move on to the next preserving project there's always another preserving project so let me get this all cleaned up and we'll do number three okay here we go last potato freezer project and this is really uh the easiest out of all three of them now several things that we love to do with potatoes over the winter especially because it requires the oven or you know something that heats up the house well we like to have big potato chunks in like beef stew and other you know stews like that we also like to make roasted potatoes in the oven my favorite recipe for roasted potatoes in the oven are the lipton onion soup potatoes where you mix big chunks of potato like this you know big chunks with one packet of lipton onion soup mix and then some oil you just mix all of that up and then you heat it in the oven i think at 350 or 375 i'm not sure the instructions are actually on the back back of the lipton onion soup box they are so good you guys that is one of our family's absolute favorite way to have roasted potatoes so between stews and soups and roasted potatoes like that we go through a lot of potatoes so this way is going to be easy for us to just take those big chunks of potato out of the freezer and use them so these potatoes which is almost all the rest that were in the basket i'm just going to cut up into larger chunks keep them in the water until i can put them into the blanching water we're going to blanch them a little bit longer because these chunks are bigger than the other ones so i'm going to probably blanch these for about four minutes and we'll cool them down drain them and then we'll also freeze them in freezer bags now this time i'm gonna pretty much pack the freezer bags full because the chunks when i freeze them they will still they'll still kind of be well they'll be easy to break apart is what i'm trying to say okay so i'm not super worried about them being in a big glob i'll just be able to smack the bag on the counter and um enough of them will break apart for me to be able to use and then i'll let them thaw or just put them right in a soup or something like that so this is the third option that you can do with your potatoes to put them in the freezer for your future use so well that does it for my potato projects for the day i hope you enjoyed spending time with me in the kitchen today and even if you have not grown your own potatoes or grown a bunch of potatoes this year you can still use these techniques because the holidays are coming and the grocery stores always have fantastic deals on potatoes right around thanksgiving and right around christmas so keep that in mind and stock up your freezers you guys make sure that you're hitting the subscribe button below if you are liking the videos that we're putting out and the best way that you can help us here on the homestead is to share our videos on all of your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 495,261

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, homegrown potatoes, homemade French fries, preserving potatoe, preserving potatoes

Id: Fz5Zj2SOMpg

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020