Frozen green beans and peas
The two crops that come all at once and go over in days. Three minutes in boiling water for beans, a minute and a half for peas, and they are saved.
Makes
About 1 kg of beans fills three 1 L freezer bags; 1 kg of pea pods gives about 400 g of shelled peas
Active time
30–45 minutes
Total
1 hour including shelling, cooling and packing
Photo JeepersMedia on Flickr · CC BY 2.0
Before you start
What matters for this one
- Blanching times are the recipe: beans 3 minutes, peas 1½ minutes, counted from when the water returns to the boil. Under-blanched vegetables keep their enzymes and go tough and dull-coloured in the freezer; over-blanched ones go mushy.
- Use plenty of water — 4 L per 450 g — so the boil recovers fast, and chill in ice water for the same number of minutes.
- Drain well. Surface water turns into a block of ice and freezer burn.
- Do not add salt or butter before freezing; season when you cook them.
This follows NCHFP: Blanching times for vegetables. 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
- Young, tender green or wax beans with the seeds just forming, and/or peas picked while the pods are full but still sweet
- A large pot of boiling water: 4 L (1 gallon) per 450 g (1 lb) of vegetables
- A tub of ice water: about 450 g of ice per 450 g of vegetables
Method
- 1
Wash the beans in cold water, snip off the ends and cut or snap into 5–10 cm (2–4 inch) pieces. Shell the peas. Both are perfect jobs for a child at the table with a bowl in their lap.
- 2
Bring the big pot to a hard boil. Add no more than 450 g of vegetables at a time so the water comes back to the boil within a minute.
- 3
Time from when the water returns to the boil: beans 3 minutes, peas 1½ minutes. Keep beans and peas in separate batches — their times are different.
- 4
Lift them out with a strainer basket straight into the ice water and chill for the same time they boiled (3 minutes for beans, 1½ for peas). Scoop them out and drain thoroughly in a colander, shaking off the water.
- 5
Spread on a clean tea towel and pat dry. Pack into freezer bags or boxes leaving 1.25 cm (½ inch) headspace, press out the air, seal and label.
- 6
Lay the bags flat in a single layer on a freezer shelf until solid, then stack. For loose, scoopable peas, freeze them first on a tray and bag once hard.
Keeps: 8–12 months at −18 °C (0 °F). Cook from frozen in a little boiling water or straight into soup; thawing first makes them soggy.
Variations: Sugar-snap and snow peas in the pod blanch 1½–3 minutes depending on size. Steam blanching takes about half again as long as water blanching.
Tested source: NCHFP: Blanching times for vegetables. 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
Green beans: when to pick, how to store, what else to make →
Green beans are the home freezer’s second crop after peas: snap or cut into 5–10 cm lengths, blanch 3 minutes, chill in ice water, drain, and tray-freeze before bagging. They also make the best pickle in this group — dilly beans, raw-packed with dill and garlic into sterilized jars (boiled 10 minutes) in a tested brine of equal parts 5 % vinegar and water with canning salt, processed 5 minutes in a boiling-water bath at 0–300 m by the NCHFP recipe. Plain beans in water are another matter entirely: they are a low-acid vegetable and must be pressure-canned, 20 minutes for 500 ml jars and 25 for litres at 10 lb (weighted gauge, 0–300 m). There is no safe boiling-water time for plain green beans, and no family recipe changes that — home-canned green beans top the historical list of foods behind botulism cases in North America, because for a century people water-bathed them. Drying green beans (‘leather britches’) works but gives a chewy, musty product; the freezer is better.
More for green beans
- Pickling
Dilly beans (pickled green beans)
Whole beans standing to attention in a garlicky dill brine — the first jar most families let the children pack.
About 8 × 500 ml (pint) jars · 45 minutes active
The recipe → - Pressure canning
Green beans, pressure canned
The first thing most people pressure-can, and the jar that teaches the whole method: plain beans, salt if you like, nothing else.
About 9 × 500 ml (pint) jars from 4 kg (9 lb) of beans, or 7 × 1 L (quart) jars from 6.4 kg (14 lb) · 1 hour active
The recipe →