How to Freeze Peppers

Got a bumper crop of sweet or bell peppers, and can’t possibly eat them all fresh before they start to go bad?

Do you wish you could eat your lovely homegrown peppers all year ’round, not just when they’re in season? Do you have spare room in your freezer?

If so, you might want to try freezing your extra peppers!

The great thing about freezing peppers is that there’s no blanching or pre-cooking required: all you need is a sharp knife, some freezer bags, and an hour or two to sit and slice.

There are a couple ways you can go about freezing your peppers.

Thin Sliced

This is the way we put up almost all of our extra peppers.

They’re great for making fajitas, stir fries, rice dishes, or more!

Start by rinsing off your peppers, checking as you go for any spoiled or damaged ones. Make sure you rinse off any clinging dirt or mud, especially if you’ve had a rain recently! Pat them dry afterwards.

Using a sharp knife, slice off the top of the pepper to remove the stem. Slice along the white ribs to remove them and the seed mass inside the pepper. Discard seeds and ribs, keep the body of the pepper.

Slice the pepper in half. Then, one half at a time, slice the pepper length-wise into long, thin slices. If you have trouble with the knife, you can actually do this part with a sharp pair of clean scissors.

Once all of the peppers are sliced, it’s time to freeze them. To prevent sticking together, spread them out first on baking sheets lined with freezer paper or parchment paper, freeze until solid, and then pack them away in freezer bags.

You can also just dump them all in a freezer bag, force out as much air as possible without squishing the peppers, and place in the freezer to freeze completely.

Sometimes you end up with clumps this way, but they quickly break up when exposed to heat, so we don’t mind.

Whole Peppers

Whole peppers are actually not the best way to put up your sweet peppers, not unless they’re small, and you don’t care about the seeds getting into what you’re cooking. This method is more often used for hot peppers.

However, you still might want to give it a try, and here’s how easy it is: simply wash your peppers, ensuring there’s no dirt, mud, spoiled spots, damage, or clinging insects tagging along. Pat dry.

After that, simply lay your peppers in a single layer in a heavy-duty freezer bag, and place in the freezer to freeze solid. That’s all there is to it!

Mixed with Onions

You can also freeze a mix of pepper and onion slices together, if you’d like.

Either slice as above or dice both the peppers and onions, and mix together. Freeze the chopped pieces on parchment-paper lined baking sheets so they’ll freeze solid before packing into bags and returning to the freezer, as they tend to stick together in one big lump if you don’t.

How to Use Frozen Peppers

Keep in mind that, as a consequence of being frozen, peppers will tend towards being soft. Any recipe in which you’d like your peppers to have a little crisp crunch to them are best done with fresh peppers.

That being said, you can toss frozen peppers directly into things like stir fries, quiches/egg cups, casseroles, fried rice… even soup! They cook easily from frozen, and slices easily can be chopped into smaller squares or bites as needed.

Freezing peppers is a delicious, easy way to ensure that you can eat your very own homegrown peppers well past the time they’ve left the garden. Bright, colorful, and full of flavor, they’ll last anywhere from 8 months to a full year once frozen.

Which is plenty enough time to carry you right back around to pepper season again, if you put up a year’s worth!