Easy Freezer Coleslaw for Year-Around Enjoyment

A neighbor once gave me a couple of huge cabbages from her garden. When I told her I wasn’t sure what to do with all that cabbage, she gave me her recipe for freezer coleslaw. I’m pretty fussy when it comes to slaw, and I already had a favorite recipe. But I gave hers a try and we loved it. Now I make it every year using produce from my own garden. The best part is that you can make all you want and freeze it in serving portions to have slaw that tastes freshly made at any time of year. And it tastes equally good plain or with a bit of mayonnaise stirred in, letting you have it both ways.

The Ingredients

For cabbage we use whatever we grow in a given year. My husband Allan and I are partial to savoy cabbage, both for slaw and for making sauerkraut. Alcosa is our go-to savoy type, because it grows fast and uses less garden space than other varieties.

Our favorite regular cabbages are Golden Acres and Faroa. Although both get less wormy than other varieties we’ve grown, the later can be fussy about not being harvested right on schedule.

Our favorite red cabbage is Express Red. When we make red slaw, we like it best without mayo.

The carrots we grow are Shin Kuroda in the spring and Eskimo in the fall. The former is our favorite. The latter is quite similar, but more readily withstands the early cold weather that sometimes kisses our garden.

Of all the different types of onions we’ve grown, the one that grows best for us here in Tennessee is Candy. Supposedly it has only a 3-month storage life. But we find that if we harvest, dry it, and store it just right, we still have a few left nearly until the next year’s harvest is due.

For mustard powder, we use Colman’s, which we use so much of we get it in one-pound containers. Vinegar can be whatever you normally use. We prefer distilled organic vinegar, which we reduce from 5% to 4% by adding one cup of water per quart of vinegar.

Freezer coleslaw is an ideal accompaniment for oven fried chicken. When we’re not particularly hungry, we’ll just have coleslaw and oven fried Yukon Gold potatoes.

Easy Freezer Coleslaw

Heat until sugar dissolves. Cool.

Pack your slaw into serving-size portions. For my husband and me, that means ¾ cup in snack bags, stored together in a larger freezer bag.

To serve freezer coleslaw, defrost and drain well. Stir in a little mayonnaise if you like it creamy.