Frozen veggies

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

Something to consider in winter eating may be the

below from the New York Times.

February 16, 2005

THE MINIMALIST

Frosty the Vegetable

By MARK BITTMAN

THIS winter, when I had my annual freakout about the quality and

price of the red peppers and the green beans sitting in my

supermarket's vegetable bins, I tried a radical approach.

I began shopping in the frozen vegetable case.

I'm old enough to remember when frozen vegetables came only in solid

rectangular blocks, and it was a part of both my post-adolescent

rebellion and commitment to " fine " food that I swore off all but

fresh. Then again I have used frozen peas every once in a while - who

hasn't? - and I am a sometime fan of well-frozen fish. So I gave it a

shot.

I confess to having had an extraordinary push. At a meal last fall at

Citronelle, the great Washington restaurant, I was served a delicious

plate of brussels sprouts. When I asked the chef, Michel ,

where they were from, he said without hesitation, " the freezer. "

Though slightly reluctant to go on the record (no other chef I spoke

to would, but Mr. can hardly be alone in this practice), he

told this story:

" A few years ago, at home, my wife, ce, made some brussels

sprouts for me. They were nice and green, and I really thought they

were something special. I asked her if they were from a chef's

garden. "

He lost his disdain of frozen then and there. ( " Cook them in butter

with a bit of chicken stock, and they are wonderful, " suggested Mr.

, who serves them with a duck pot au feu.)

In the months that followed I played with frozen brussels sprouts,

peas, green beans, collards, mustard greens, okra, kale, rutabagas,

corn and other denizens of the freezer case. The works. That I was

frequently pleasantly surprised is far more interesting to me than

that I was occasionally disappointed.

I quickly learned that you're not going to have a transcendent

experience dining on plain steamed frozen vegetables. (No surprise

there, but who eats steamed undressed vegetables no matter how fresh

they are?) After all, Mr. 's minimal treatment of his brussels

sprouts depends on his excellent stock and butter. I became enamored

of cut green beans poured straight from the package into a pan with a

bit of good olive oil, then cooked until browned and seasoned with a

sprinkle of salt. Sometimes I served the beans over mixed greens,

which wilted from the heat of the beans.

What follows are recipes for some of the dishes I liked best. The

chicken-in-a-pot is a straight-ahead poached chicken; the frozen

vegetables in the recipe are cooked in the resulting stock. My guests

raved. The flat rutabaga omelet became a staple at my house. I simply

sautéed some frozen rutabagas in a pan - almost any vegetable would

be equally good - and built a small omelet around them.

In general I felt I was eating " fresher " vegetables, which were

brighter in color, more distinctive in flavor and more consistently

pleasing in texture than much of what I had been buying in

the " fresh " bins. Not insignificant - and only a snob would say these

aspects don't matter - I also found them more convenient and

certainly less expensive.

I was amazed to find I could use frozen red and yellow bell pepper

strips straight from the package. (I am aware that this is not a

revelation to everyone; call me stupid.) The peppers were great in a

simple quick dish of fried rice and for $2.59 a pound I could not

help comparing them favorably to the less tasty red and yellow

peppers from Holland, which cost $4 and $5 a pound and yield only

about half their weight in usable flesh.

The result was a flush of enthusiasm. I was a convert.

But like Michel , I was an ashamed and slightly sheepish

convert. I needed additional expert approval to validate my

experience. So I called Harold McGee, author of " On Food and Cooking:

The Science and Lore of the Kitchen " (Scribner, 2004). The minute Mr.

McGee started talking, I felt relief. " The quality of vegetables, " he

said, " is more or less preserved at the stage they're frozen. If

frozen vegetables are handled expeditiously, they are often better

than buying 'fresh' at the store. "

It's true. Freezing, especially after blanching (which is almost

always a part of the process), locks in both flavor and nutrients.

And the use of I.Q.F. (individually quick frozen) technology has

become routine, and the results are profoundly better than freezing

vegetables in solid blocks. (These products are almost always sold in

plastic bags, not boxes, and as a rule you should buy frozen

vegetables in plastic bags.)

All of this may sound like a commercial, but like it or not many

frozen vegetables are better than many so-called fresh, which can

take weeks to go from field to table.

That said, stay away from packages that are partially thawed or show

evidence of having been thawed and refrozen, which is a sure way to

degrade quality. The telltale sign of this is a hard lump of

vegetable rather than individual pieces.

Mr. McGee couldn't with certainty answer my next question, which

was, " Are name-brand frozen vegetables higher quality than

supermarket varieties? " His guess, like mine, was that it didn't

matter much.

To maintain quality, the food companies issue specifications that

contractors strive to meet. Vegetables are commodities, grown and

frozen worldwide under contract to packagers or to be sold on the

open market.

G. Sarasin, the president of the American Frozen Food

Institute, a trade organization, explained: " The frozen vegetable

industry has become global. Historically some companies sourced only

in the United States, but that has become less true. "

Most companies, she said, buy at least some crops from domestic

growers; some grow some themselves. But they also buy vegetables that

have been frozen elsewhere. In other words, a lima bean from Modesto

may sit next to one from Argentina and a third from China.

Ms. Sarasin declined to comment about whether the specifications

differ greatly from one company to another. But basically it's like

any other business: If Green Giant is doing a better job of

supervising its contractors than Stop & Shop or Albertson's, it's

worth the price premium. If the supermarket packers are doing their

job, the less expensive product is a bargain.

During my post-freakout experiments I ate both name and store brands.

I could find no consistent difference and would quite frankly never

pay the premium for name-brand frozen vegetables.

None of this is to say that I now routinely head straight for the

frozen vegetable case. Some vegetables still seem better fresh: dark

leafy greens like kale, collards and spinach (all of which can be

grown somewhere in the United States year round); and broccoli,

potatoes, onions and carrots, which keep well and are popular enough

to turn over fast.

But wallflower root vegetables like turnips tend to sit around and

are better frozen than waxed and mushy. And peas, corn, green beans

and beans you can rarely buy fresh - limas, favas and edamame - and

my now-beloved pepper strips are all better bets frozen, from now

until at least May.

After that, presumably, summer will change my habits once again.

Cheers, Al Pater