– What makes some fruit “freezable” and others not? Here (in America, anyway) you can buy frozen mango and peaches and berries, but not oranges or apples or pears.
In: 262
Pears and apples can be frozen, so I’m not sure why they are not as common in the frozen food section. But citrus fruit and watermelon cannot be frozen because there’s too much water in them, and when the water freezes it expands, rupturing the membrane of the fruit. When thawed it will be mush.
Apples might not be sold frozen because fresh apples are readily available year around and keep well. There’s just little demand for frozen or canned apples.
That wouldn’t apply to pears, though. Maybe it’s just that pears are a popular canned fruit and freezing never caught on.
I’m not sure about the freezability of them but apples keep very well without being frozen. They stay good in proper storage for around a year so there probably isn’t a need to freeze them.
I make a fruit smoothie for breakfast most days and frozen apples, pears, citrus, bananas, and berries are frequent ingredients. Bc I’m not worried about the texture, since it will be ground up, pretty much all fruits are fair game as long as they were cleaned and pitted prior to freezing.
I live on a FL farm and we run a food share program. Sometimes we get so much food we can’t give it away fast enough. So we freeze a lot. And when we run out of freezer space, we feed surplus to our cattle, pigs, and chickens.
As an example, there’s a nice lady who stocks regional gas stations with bananas, apples, and oranges. Anything she takes back as over ripe comes to us. What we can’t give away for human use, we use for animals.
Our neighbor is a wild animal rescue and they use fruit for their bats, lemurs, and monkeys. Our cattle and pigs get 5lbs of bananas (with peals) a day and they don’t care if the fruit is black and mushy.
You can freeze pretty much any fruit. The frozen stuff you find in grocery stores are flash frozen with liquid nitrogen, which minimizes cellular damage. I think the others in this thread touched up on why you tend to find some frozen foods more often than others
I am pretty sure that it’s mainly because of price/volume and availability reasons.
Mango and berries are expensive, mango are imports and berries very expensive.
Peaches are seasonally available but less expensive.
Orange apple and pear are available all year round at about the same price via local production, import, long term conservation and not that much expensive.
I am French and i don’t remember seeing frozen peaches, only berries and mango, but i think the same logic applies to our supermarkets.
AS a note, commercial trades and pricing can lead to odd things. Last time i looked it up (20 years ago). France was basically not exporting the cheapest wine.
Because if you account transport and volume/price. It’s more interesting to export the more expensive wine. Ie cheap wine bottle cost 3€ + 3€ transport, but expensive wine cost 15€+3€ transport and you get a better margin on it.
I think the same kind of logic applies to frozen goods.
It was strange to realise we were keeping the lowest quality stuff for ourselves, even if we had the highest production and consumption of wine.
Almost any fruit could be frozen to satisfaction. But the juicier—riper—the fruit, the better the outcome.
Apples I suspect is a texture issue. You are used to a crunchy apple. After you freeze it you will eat apple mush. Still edible if you don’t mind the texture. I suspect that is the main reason. Same for pears.
Frozen grapes are pretty solid. They can be used as ice cubes in wines you want to keep chilled and then eaten when used up.
The ones you can get fresh and semi local tend to be offered that way. Also a longer shelf life.
Latest Answers