Some farmers' markets, like the one in Union Square, may continue to set up shop in the winter months, but the pickings are often slim. Plus, sometimes you just don't want to go anywhere to fill your Crock-Pot on a cold, blustery day.
Luckily, not since 1924 when Brooklyn native Clarence Birdseye introduced us to the goodness of flash freezing — the colder and faster the process, the less damage to the food — have we been so excited about frozen vegetables.
"It's the next wave," says chef Rob Newton of Seersucker Restaurant in Carroll Gardens, where he serves an organic heirloom-tomato soup made with frozen tomatoes from Hudson Valley Harvest. "The idea of using a fresh tomato from November to the following summer is just out of the question," he says.
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ROYALTY FREE frozen vegetables edamame peas broccoli corn spinach veggies Pile of Frozen Vegetables HI RES FILE
Paul Alward, Seersucker co-owner and farmer, agrees: "With New York's climate and growing season, freezing is really the only way to eat local year round. Technology has improved to where it's a better product now."
In fact, frozen veggies may even be better than fresh.
"Vegetables picked for commercial-freezing purposes are allowed to fully ripen on the vine before they are cut," says Miriam Pappo, director of clinical nutrition at Montefiore Medical Center. "That means they have the highest amount of flavor and nutrients."
"No one is saying it wouldn't be better to live next door to a farm," says "Cooking Issues" radio host and chef Dave Arnold, "but the argument is that chain of supply does not exist, so it's better to freeze a product soon after harvest than buy a so-called fresh product that's compromised by time and transportation."
Fresh green beans, for example, lose 45 percent of their nutrients in shipping. Broccoli and cauliflower lose 25 percent, says Pappo.
Of course, a raw salad is unlikely to taste better with defrosted vegetables. But apply heat, says Arnold, and "the cell rupturing you get from freezing you get from cooking anyway."
You're not going to find entire menus based on them, but chefs and foodies have long believed that certain vegetables — peas and corn in particular — are as good, if not better, frozen than fresh.
"When you pick those two at their peak, they're very sweet," says Wylie Dufresne, chef of experimental spot WD-50. "But very quickly the sugar turns to starch and the vegetable becomes less sweet. Unless you live on a farm, frozen is the best version you can have."
Dufresne doesn't serve them, and doesn't recommend them as an unadorned side dish, but he does say frozen peas and corn can be great in soups and purées.
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