EASY WAY TO FREEZE BERRIES

Here is just one of the many dewberry hauls we have gotten over the last few weekends.  Sadly "dewberry season" is officially over now.  I got the last couple of buckets yesterday.  Now, what to do with all these berries?  Here is how we do it, a great way to keep them almost as fresh as the day they were picked:

The first thing to do is...

 ...rinse and wash them!  I use this berry colander, which was my Mom's, it's ceramic and supposed to be non reactive with berries, but there were so many, I ended up using a mesh strainer anyway, no problems with reaction.

Once they were washed a few times, I poured them onto a couple layers of paper towels, just to take some of the moisture off.  Then you take some more paper towels...

...and put them on top of the damp berries, gently patting them down.  This takes off some more moisture from the top side. 

Then spread them out in a more or less single layer on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.  They can stack a bit it's ok.  I use that new "pan lining paper" from Reynolds but you could use wax paper too, just something that keeps them from sticking to the metal. Once they are all laid out, just put the tray in the freezer as is.

Here is the same sheet pan of dewberries, taken out the next night (you can see that they are a bit frosty from the temperature change).  By doing it this way, they are individually frozen.  They are almost like little "berry marbles", which is exactly what you want them to be like.  They can thaw rapidly so work fast.

Then I simply take a 2 cup measuring cup and fill it to the top.  In this case, I filled it past the 2 cup mark, you know, just to have a little "extra", ha.  Two cups is a great measurement for cooking.  For example, our cobbler recipe (posted soon) uses that, so it's easy to grab one package out of the freezer and be good to go.

At this point, you can put them into whatever package you want, a ziplock baggie, a tupperware container, or as we do here, a vacuum sealer (awesome device, and a must have in your kitchen).  We like the vacuum sealer for long term storage and since there are no berries until next Spring...

...we'll have lots of packages like these in the freezer.  I just wrote the quantity and date on each package and plopped them back in the freezer.  You can use this technique for any berry, and it works great for the delicate ones that might otherwise become a frozen clump a few months later.  Enjoy your berry haul!