Party Thyme, Preserving the Summer – What is blanching?

Last night I shared some fresh salsa made in my super cool KitchenAid blender. I’m lovin’ my new blender! It’s sssssooooo much better than my old cheapo Oster blender! This upgrade was long overdue.

If you recall, my salsa recipe called for blanched tomatoes. Well, I’ve been thinking that you may not be familiar with what it means to blanch food. Or for that matter, why you would need to blanch something.

So what is blanching?

It’s taking fruits, vegetables, or nuts and immersing them in boiling water or fat briefly and then submerging them in ice cold water.

Why would we blanch food?

There are two main reasons why a recipe would call you to blanch foods.

Blanching items like tomatoes, peaches and almonds allow you to easily remove the skin.
Blanching items like green beans allows vegetables to retain their beautiful color before freezing them for future use.

Here’s how I blanched my tomatoes for my super yummy salsa.

Step one, I washed and cored my tomatoes.

Then I dropped them into a pot of boiling water. Doesn’t the boiling water make the picture look crazy?

Then I used a strainer to remove the tomatoes from the boiling water and plunged them into a sink full of cold water. Yes. there really is water in this sink.