How To Freeze Blackberries

We love fresh fruit! And we assume since you are here, you do too! We always end up growing more blackberries than we intend to because we over plant to begin with. Since we always end up with a huge harvest, we decided we needed to learn how to freeze blackberries.

Steps for how to freeze blackberries

Blackberries are fantastic! They are delicious on their own, but you can also make jams out of them, put them in pie, on cobbler, or put them in a delicious fruit smoothie.

Because they were so good and because we hate wasting things, we decided to learn how to freeze Blackberries. It’s super easy to do. Just follow the steps below.

Step One

After growing blackberries, when we harvest them, the first thing we do is washed them, especially if we’re going to preserve them. Now, do you have to wash fresh blackberries before freezing? You don’t have to, but you probably don’t want to preserve all of the dirt and nasty stuff that can accumulate while being outside.

What we typically do is pile all of our blackberries into a metal colander in the sink, and then just rinse them with a steady stream of cool water.

Make sure you work you hands through all.of the blackberries and allow the water to wash over everything. This will make sure all of the dirt, bug stuff, or anything else from outdoors is washed off.

Step Two

After you’ve washed all of your blackberries and you feel like they’re clean enough, you will want to give them time to dry. You can just leave them in the colander and make sure it is elevated to allow airflow to go through the holes.

Once they are dry, you’ll want to take a 9 x 13 baking pan and arrange them in a single layer. You don’t need to cut them or anything. You can freeze whole blackberries.

Put them into your freezer and allow them to freeze overnight. It should really only take a couple of hours, but if you do it overnight you won’t feel the need to check on them every hour or so.

Step Three

Now that you had a good night’s rest, your blackberries should be completely frozen. Take the cookie sheet out of the freezer.

Now you want to transfer all of your blackberries from your cookie sheets into quart size freezer bags. We like to measure them out a cup at a time. That allows us to keep decent portions and we know how much we’re eating and how much we still have left. This information is important if you are ever doing a pantry inventory or taking the pantry challenge.

If you are freezing a lot of blackberries all at one time, you can use gallon size freezer bag. It is important to use bags designed for the freezer. They’re much better at keeping moisture out of the bag and avoiding frostbite.

How long can you keep blackberries in the freezer?

If you followed all the steps above correctly (which honestly how could you not?) your blackberries should stay fresh for upwards of a year.

They may still be safe to eat after a year but will likely suffer in quality. Always follow FDA guidelines on food preservation safety.

How do you defrost frozen blackberries?

You may be asking yourself, “how do you freeze blackberries without them getting mushy?”. The answer is not in how you freeze them, but in how you defrost them.

A simple way to do this is to take a portion of berries and put them in a bowl on the counter top. Fill that bowl with cold water and leave them sitting for just a couple of minutes.

Come back and check on the berries and see if they have defrosted. If they are still frozen, replace the water with fresh cold water and repeat the process until your berries are defrosted but still firm.

If you do this too long, the berries can then start to retain some of that water and soak it in, and then they will become mushy.