Freezing Carrot "Juice" for Smoothies

We still have carrots in the ground from last year.  The overwintering thing is brilliant--but we may have once again planted too many carrots.  We're eating them every day, but with just the two of us twenty, thirty, forty pounds of carrots lasts a long time.  With the Vitamix we started putting them in our smoothies nearly every day, too.  And still, there was a good patch of them out in the garden.
Wanting the space they were still currently occupying Matt and I decided to see if we could puree up the carrots and then freeze them.  In this way we could preserve the carrots, get back the garden space, and still have carroty-goodness in our smoothies.

We were uncertain about how freezing carrots "juice" would work.   We have never tried to thaw it and use it in any fashion except in smoothies.  As such, I can't say it would be tasty to thaw and drink as carrot juice.  It might be, but somehow I doubt it.  Watery things never seem to thaw well in that way.  It works perfect as a solution for our problem though.
How We Make Vitamix Carrot "Juice"
We take a couple pounds of carrots and a handful of ice cubes and process them until smooth and fairly liquid.
Then we pour this semi-liquid into ice cube trays or our silicon cupcake pan and pop it in the freezer.
Once frozen we remove them from the trays and store them in jars or bags in the freezer. 

This makes it a snap to add a carroty cupcake puck or a handful of orange ice cubes to our morning smoothie.  The ice cubes seems to blend up more quickly than the cupcake pucks which makes sense since they are much smaller.
The start of a smoothie--banana, greens, and carrot cubes.
We still need to make a few more batches of juice before the last of them are out of the garden, but we're close.  We'll have to wait until it dries out a bit first, too.  So much rain lately, but hey, no complaints here!

(Note:  It is not really juice since we puree up the whole carrot along with a handful of ice cubes thus retaining all the fiber and nutrients in the fleshy, pulpy part of the carrot, too, not just the juice.  Its really more of a carrot slurry, but that doesn't sound as appetizing.)

Comments

  1. We used to use this sort of thing as a hidden addition to spaghetti sauce and other saucy type things. In red sauces, you can't tell it's even there and it ups your nutrition. (Google search sneaky chef or something about hiding veggies in kids' foods and you'll get tons of ideas.) The kids are pretty good about eating their veggies now, but I used to worry. They wouldn't eat ANYTHING, so I used some of these techniques to up their nutrition. For the most part, they were never the wiser.

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  2. As a matter of coincidence I picked up a copy of The Sneaky Chef at the thrift shop a couple weeks ago. I haven't looked at it much yet though--thanks for the reminder! And how nice that your kids are eating their veggies now! Yay! Good work.

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