How to freeze Swiss chard

Every year, we grow a nice patch of Swiss chard. We love how tasty it is and how it doesn’t bolt to seed in the heat like spinach can. But there’s always more than we can eat at any given time. Bill and I have come up with a great method for preserving it. I wanted to show you how to freeze Swiss chard.

A few days ago, we went out to the garden. We sliced off all but a couple of the center stems of each Swiss chard plant. We know the plants will quickly produce more leaves to harvest well before the weather turns cold.

I washed the leaves and snipped off some of the tougher, long stems; those went into the compost pile. I stacked several leaves on top of each other, chopped them cross-wise into about 2″-long chunks and set them aside. We also cut some onions into large chunks.

Next, Bill heated some canola oil in two large skillets. As soon as the skillets were hot, he sauteed the onion chunks until they were soft and set them aside.

At that point, he started cooking the chopped Swiss chard leaves until they had wilted nicely. After placing them into a large metal bowl, he cooked the next batch of chard leaves.

Once everything had been cooked, he added all of the sauteed onions to the bowl and mixed them together. Then it was time to let everything cool down.

As soon as the mixture was cool, I spooned about 2 cups into each quart-size freezer bag. Then I popped them into the freezer.

You would not believe how quick and easy this is to do. The chard freezes beautifully and we love how well onions go with it! We also like sprinkling some red wine vinegar onto the leaves. Yum.

Another option is to stack several large chard leaves together and place them into gallon-size freezer bags. (without doing any cooking) Then put them into the freezer. Those frozen leaves are easy to chop roughly and make great additions to soups and stews. Enjoy!