Tray-frozen berries: raspberries, strawberries, haskap
No sugar, no syrup, nothing to measure — a single layer on a tray, then a bag you can pour from. The way to save a picking before it moulds overnight.
Makes
A standard baking sheet holds about 1 kg of berries per freezing round
Active time
15 minutes
Total
3–4 hours to freeze hard, then bag
Photo Vanilla and lace on Flickr · CC BY 2.0
Before you start
What matters for this one
- Tray-freeze and bag promptly: berries left loose in the freezer freezer-burn within days. The quality rule here is the whole method.
- Freeze no more than will go hard within 24 hours, in single layers; a deep bowl of berries freezes slowly and bleeds juice.
- Thawed berries are soft and weep juice — they are for cooking, baking and blending, not a fruit plate. Do not refreeze a thawed bag.
- Wash before freezing, not after; frozen berries thaw too fast under the tap.
This follows NCHFP: Dry or tray packing for fruits. Quantities, acid and times are theirs; do not scale the vegetables without scaling everything, and do not change the vinegar, lemon juice or processing time.
Ingredients
- Fully ripe, firm berries — raspberries, strawberries or haskap — picked dry if possible
- Nothing else
Method
- 1
Sort the berries and pull out leaves, stems and any that are mushy or mouldy; those go to the chickens or the compost. Children are good at this, especially if allowed to eat the rejects.
- 2
Rinse gently in a colander under cold water and drain well. Spread on a clean towel and let them dry for a few minutes — wet berries freeze with a frost coat and clump.
- 3
Hull strawberries with a paring knife or the tip of a teaspoon; leave raspberries and haskap whole.
- 4
Spread in a single layer, not touching, on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Slide onto a flat freezer shelf.
- 5
As soon as they are hard — usually 2–4 hours — pour them into labelled freezer bags or boxes, press out the air and seal. Do not leave them on the open tray overnight or they dry out and pick up freezer smells.
- 6
Pour out what you need and reseal the bag. Use from frozen in porridge, muffins, pancakes and smoothies; thaw in the fridge for sauce.
Keeps: 8–12 months at −18 °C (0 °F). Haskap and raspberries keep their flavour best; strawberries soften most on thawing.
Variations: For a sweeter pack NCHFP gives a sugar pack: 175 ml (¾ cup) sugar stirred gently into each litre (about 600 g) of berries until it dissolves, then packed with headspace. Sliced strawberries hold their shape better in sugar than whole ones. Haskap behave like blueberries in the freezer and in every muffin recipe.
Tested source: NCHFP: Dry or tray packing for fruits. Checked October 2026. If a jar did not seal, refrigerate it and use it within a few days. Never taste anything from a jar that is bulging, leaking, spurting or smells wrong — when in doubt, throw it out without tasting.
The crop
Raspberries: when to pick, how to store, what else to make →
Rinse them gently in cold water, drain and dry on a towel, then spread them on a tray, freeze and bag. They hold their shape and flavour better than any other berry. For jam, raspberries have enough natural pectin to set with sugar alone by a tested long-boil recipe, or quickly with added pectin; for seedless jam press half or all of the fruit through a food mill or sieve before measuring, then follow the recipe’s weights. Whole raspberries are on the tested list for canning (raw pack in syrup, 15 minutes for 500 ml jars at 0–300 m) but come out soft and pale — jam, syrup and the freezer suit them better. Raspberry vinegar is a safe and good use for a surplus. What does not work: washing before storage (mould in a day), and drying — a dried raspberry is a hard seedy pebble; make leather from the purée instead.
More for raspberries
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The brightest jar on the shelf, from the canes that fruit again in September. Liquid pectin keeps the cooking short and the flavour fresh.
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The recipe → - Drying
Fruit leather, apple or berry
Purée poured thin and dried into a roll-up: the snack children ask for by name, made from the fruit that was too soft for anything else.
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