Okra- Harvesting, & Preserving

Tis the season for fresh vegetables!  I got a request for okra from Facebook, so I am accepting the challenge.   I don't cook a lot of fried foods at my house, but I love fresh fried okra, and it's coming in season, especially if you started it indoors early.

So, if you are picking the okra yourself, you want to harvest it when the fruits are 2-3 inches long, and if it's your plants, only harvest every other day.  If you let the okra get bigger than 2-3 inches, they look really impressive, but they are really tough, and impossible to eat!  Wear gloves and long sleeps to harvest, since the plants generally have spines on them that will irritate your skin. Cut the stems just above the cap of the fruit with a sharp knife, and if it's too tough to cut, it's going to be too tough to eat. Young and tender, that's the goal with okra.

So now that you have a basket full of fresh okra, head on in to the house.  You will probably have a surplus of okra, because it's easy to grow, and crops produce large yields. So, I will tell you how to save it for the winter also.

The first thing you want to do is wash all the pods. Set aside any that are broken to go ahead and use for your dinner.  Trim the pod caps with a sharp knife, but trim them in such a way as you don't open up the pod cavity.

Now the best way to save your okra is to blanch it, and then freeze it whole. Blanching the okra stops the process that the enzymes inside the seed pods are working on.  So bring a gallon of water to a boil in a large pot.  While the water is getting hot, empty one side of your sink, and fill it about 1/2 way with cold water.  When the water starts to boil, go ahead and dump in about 1-2 quarts of fresh okra pods.  Wait until the water starts to boil, then put the lid on and start timing.  Boil 3 minutes for smaller pods and 4 minutes for larger ones.  While the okra is blanching, add a bunch of ice to the sink of cold water.

When the time is up, dump the blanched okra into a colander in the empty side of your sink.  Then plunge the drained okra into the ice water.  The point here is to STOP the cooking process. Swish them around, and make sure you cool them off completely.

Now drain the okra, and pat it dry with a clean kitchen towel.  It's generally easier to just freeze the okra whole, and slice it later, but you can also go ahead and slice it now, if you like.  So either way, put it on a cookie sheet and place it in the freezer to get nice and frozen. If you wanted to, you could go ahead and bread the okra if you are going to be frying it later, but in my experience, the breading gets knocked off in the freezer before it gets cooked, so you have to re-bread it anyway.

Once the okra is frozen, label and date some ziploc bags, or put it in foodsaver bags for storage. Now you can enjoy your own fresh okra even when it isn't in season!  Tomorrow, I'll post a recipe for frying fresh okra!