TracyFood

Ask TracyFood: Freezing cilantro? 9 January 2008 12:25 pm

Posted by Tracy in : advice, convenience, cooking, food storage, friends, geekery, seasonality , trackback

Hey Tracy,

I bought a bunch of cilantro and used like 1/3 of it and I don’t want the rest to go bad but there’s really not a lot I’m planning for it right now. Can I freeze it, and how would I do that best?

Thanks,
Penny

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Hi Penny!

When I first wrote you back about this a month ago, I said, “You can definitely freeze cilantro, although I’ve never tried and so can’t speak from personal experience,” and referred to everything I learned about freezing fresh herbs when Marcy asked me about storing basil, especially all the advice I got from the people who left comments on my post about it. Then I got all excited about saving the cilantro stems for use in soup stock like in the north African chickpea soup with harissa from Jack Bishop’s A Year In a Vegetarian Kitchen. And then of course I had to try my own cilantro-freezing experiments, and reporting on them is why I am writing you this letter (also to get back into writing Ask TracyFood, because it’s super-fun!)

I decided to take my own advice and that of various and sundry TracyFood commenters, and pulled the cilantro leaves off the stems and put them in a zip-lock style plastic bag in the freezer. (I saved the stems in a separate bag, but I haven’t used them yet.) To my surprise, the leaves didn’t clump together (despite my best efforts to squeeze all the extra air out of the bag). Instead, they more or less all froze separately so I could just shake out as many leaves as I wanted at a time — convenient! I used up the frozen leaves of half a bunch of cilantro in two or three weeks of cooking, and it worked great. I haven’t found any information about how long frozen herbs will keep before losing their magic, but my general rule of thumb is to throw out anything that’s been in the freezer for more than a year because if I haven’t eaten it yet, there’s obviously something wrong with it.

Hmmm, what else? Well, the frozen cilantro worked great — it turned pretty dark on thawing, just like it does when cooked, but since I was cooking with it that wasn’t a problem for me. If I were feeling super-picky and/or obsessive-compulsive about diminishing the side effects of my food preservation, I could try blanching the herbs before freezing, a technique recommended by my friend Christine and seconded by Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, but I don’t think I’d boil water to blanch the leaves of just half a bunch of cilantro, especially since it turns out I can use that amount fairly quickly. The frozen cilantro usually thawed while I was cutting it, which was a little tricky to work with (wilted leaves looove to stick to knife blades), so next time I might try freezing chopped cilantro to see how that works (I’m guessing clumpier). The weirdest effect I noticed, though, was that the frozen cilantro had almost no smell until it was cooked (essential oils, blah blah blah — I could geek out for hours but I’ll spare us both). The no-smell thing made me use more cilantro than recipes called for, because I was worried that freezing had somehow damaged the herb’s taste, but in the end it all worked out fine and I ended up with a few cilantro-heavy recipes, but nothing rendered inedible by my experiment, which is really what counts. Science rules!

Anyway, happy freezing and of course big love,
-Tracy