The Culinary Sin of Frozen Vegetables

Last week my fiancé came back from the market with a bag of frozen vegetables. He noticed that I spend a lot of time in the kitchen cutting fresh vegetables, and thought that buying them pre-cut and chilled would save me some time. The frozen mix included broccoli, cauliflower and baby carrots.

These vegetables are now cooking on the stove with a heavy tomato paprika sauce, strengthened with some freshly chopped onion and garlic.  Unlike fresh produce that really doesn’t need much except a drop of olive oil and some fresh herbs that would bring out its natural taste, frozen vegetables need killing with external flavors. Violently.

It obviously takes time to process frozen vegetables. First they are picked, then sorted, cleaned, washed, cut, frozen, packaged, shipped, and received at the selling point.  A food technologist friend (who works in a meat processing plant, but still knows a lot about other branches of the industry) told me that an average frozen vegetable spends one month at various processing and retail points before reaching the consumer.

One. Month.

Now imagine buying a broccoli and leaving it lying around for a month. Even in proper storage temperatures it wouldn’t be a lovely business. And let’s not forget that once a bag of frozen vegetables is bought, it could spend a lot more time than one month in the home fridge.

When I opened the frozen mix bag today, I discovered stringy broccoli, withered cauliflower and baby carrots that seemed to survive nicely the atrocities that have been committed against them in the name of convenience.

I started by defrosting the vegetables. I chopped a large onion and five cloves of garlic, then sautéed them until soft and translucent; added the vegetables, paste from fresh tomatoes, a little bit of boiled water, and a ridiculous variety of spices. Why ridiculous? Because no fresh vegetable ever needs this much.

Besides the obvious salt and pepper, my vegetable stew also included broth (containing meat flavors), paprika, basil, thyme, cumin and turmenic. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever used all these together for cooking a plant before. Meat, sure. Chicken, absolutely. Not broccoli.

So my stew is on the stove, the vegetables are being cooked to death in sauce, and I’m waiting to see the whole thing even come out okay – also something I never do with fresh produce. Holding a solid, sweet-scented carrot, a potato still carrying the flavors of the earth, or a perfect ripe tomato, I never doubt how they’d end up after cooking. The bottom line is always delicious dinner. No bugs, no failures.

My final peeve with frozen vegetables is the price. For the price of 1 frozen mix bag , I could have bought 4-10 kg. (9-22 pounds) of fresh produce (depending which vegetables exactly I’d choose).

The bottom line, at least for me, is that frozen vegetables are not worth it. They’re not as delicious, they require more preparation (despite being pre-cut), and they cost more. An ultimate culinary sin.

vegetable stew from a mix bag, cooking to death

Also for dinner: roasted top rump of beef with portabella and onions and white rice.  Chocolate walnut muffins for dessert.

Tags: broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, cooking, dinner, food, stew, vegetables