I love the summer glut of vegetables that my garden produces every year. And I have had loads of success with my capsicums in past summers.
And if I’m not growing them, or they are still coming on, I know I can always find plenty at my local farmers’ market.
Preserving them means I can enjoy their goodness all year round and they are just as delicious in casseroles, stews or winter soups, as they are in a summer salad!
For me capsicums do seem to come later in the season for me. We are in a small, slightly cooler micro-climate than most of our close neighbours, so our summers are more mild than true Mediterranean climates.
This just means I need to be more patient when waiting for my crops. I often won’t get tomatoes or capsicum until the second or third month of summer but my patience is always rewarded with a glut of produce eventually!
And like most plants they start producing a few then seem to produce a lot in the middle of their productive period, then it drops off to a few towards the end of the season.
So I am always trying out new methods of preserving that glut so that I can use the fruits of my labour through out the year – even when the season turns to the cooler months of Autumn and Winter.
Preparing to Freeze your Capsicums
Here’s how I prepare my capsicums for freezing:
Ingredients
- Red Capsicums
- Cooking Oil Spray
Method
Before you begin preparing the capsicums, pre-heat your oven to 180°C (around 350°F).
Slice up the capsicums into five or six big pieces, cutting from around the stem down towards the base. Remove any seeds and the inner membrane from the slices. You really want them to sit reasonably flat on the baking tray so all of the skin is facing up, not down on the baking paper.
Cover a baking tray (or two if you have lots of capsicums) with baking paper and lay the capsicums out, skin side up on the trays.
If you are keen to reduce the waste of the baking paper, you can use a silicon baking mat, such as this one, instead of the single-use baking paper.
Spray them with cooking oil. I use coconut oil as it has a higher burn point and is less likely to become carcinogenic at higher temperatures.
Roast the capsicum pieces in the oven for around 20-25 minutes or until the skin just starts to blacken around the edges. But not so long that the whole piece blackens.
The timing for this depends a little bit on your oven and a little bit on the size of the pieces that you have placed on the tray.
Smaller pieces will cook more quickly so when cutting them, try to keep them as uniform as possible. You can see from my photo above that they are not all perfectly the same, but they are similar in size.
Once they are roasted, remove from the oven and place the whole tray somewhere to cool.
When the capsicums are cool, place them in a freezer proof container. You can pop them all in one container if freezer space is an issue, or you can portion them out into smaller ‘recipe’ amounts.
I put all of mine into one container as I find, even when frozen, they are easy enough to ‘peel’ off from the stack in the freezer container.
Once they are in the freezer proof containers, simply place them in the freezer. They will be frozen within 12 hours.
That’s it – it is about 5 minutes effort to prepare them and a few minutes to pop them in the freezer once they are done.
And you will have them for adding to all those lovely winter stews, casseroles or soups whenever you need them!
Try this delicious twist on pumpkin soup with your frozen, roasted capsicum!
