Ideas for Tomato Tonnage
After you have made tomato sandwiches, salads, stews, and more, it is tempting to just toss the rest of your CSA or home garden tomato harvest in the compost heap. Preserving tomatoes is not that hard and you will thank yourself in the fall for putting up farm fresh goodness. Here are a few ideas for easy preserving: Make easy sauce: Most tomato sauce recipes call for blanching the tomatoes, which is the most time consuming (and burn inducing) part of the work. It is easier to just skip the blanching and puree the whole tomato. Freeze your sauce for less work than canning. Keep reading for more delicious ideas!
Make pseudo sun-dried tomatoes: Halve and dry in a dehydrator or low temp (as low as you can get it, ideally 145 deg F.) oven for 12 - 24 hours. They will be ready to store at room temperature when you can break one in half and see no beads of moisture.
Make ketchup: Ketchup (catsup?) requires a tremendous amount of tomatoes. Just yesterday I made a batch with about 15 pounds of tomatoes and ended up with a meager three half pints of ketchup. Homemade ketchup is fabulously delicious, making it worth the effort. These are basic directions, which I modified by substituting molasses and honey for sugar and juniper berries for aromatics. If you aren’t obsessed with canning like me, just freeze in small containers.
Freeze: As a last resort, throw your maters in the freezer. Whole is fine. Put them in a container to reduce freezer burn. When you thaw frozen whole tomatoes, the texture will be completely broken, but they are still useful to add to stews and sauces.
Even if you do compost rotten tomatoes, all is not lost. Our compost heap volunteers have turned out to be fabulous producers!
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Related Tags: csa • gardening • tomatoes
September 4th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Thanks for this! :)
September 4th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
I am a recent convert to pressure canning and while time and labor intensive, it is very addictive. Very. Gonna do a few chickens next week to free up some freezer space for vegetables.
September 4th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
We’re planning on cooking up some of our tomatoes that didn’t ripen all the way. Mmmm… Fried Green Tomato Weekend. :D
September 4th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
I find the easiest way is to tightly pack olive oil coated tomatoes in a roasting pan. Preheat your oven to 450. Roast them till soft and slightly carmelized and then put them through a food mill and freeze them. It removes the seeds and skins and you get carmelized tomato puree to freeze. It couldn’t be easier or more tasty.
September 4th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Yeah, my tomatoes are on their last legs, too. So over the past week there’s been a lot of this:
(Argh, why are the images not showing up?)
We put up a bunch of pizza sauce last week using harvested Amish paste tomatoes. Like walker, I think we have some fried green tomatoes in store in the next couple of days.
September 5th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Towards the end of the harvest, I like to make green tomato pie. I found the recipe in the Dispatch a few years ago and I’m glad I tried it. The end result is a lot like apple pie, but the flavor and texture is uniquely different. I’d like to make a savory pie one day with ground pepper and onions maybe. I’m just not into baking a lot.
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/food/stories/2007/07/18/CLASSIC18_ART_07-18-07_E2_LM7A0EF.html?print=yes
September 5th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
I love those “squat” wide-mouth cup jars. My wife brought some home to can her yellow tomato catsup. Too cute.
Just a few words of warning for any would-be canners: Be VERY cautious about where you get your canning recipes and about modifying any that you find. Make sure that your recipes are recent (to reflect changes in sugar/acid content of fruit and vegetable varieties, the latest studies on avoiding food poisoning, etc.) and from reputable sources like extension services or universities.
As with all recipes, when making changes, you might end up with a wonderful new variation. With canning, upsetting the sometimes delicate chemistry of heat, acid, sugars, pectin and all their potential reagents, solvents, and catalysts can sometimes spell “inedible disaster” at best, ”invisible botulin factory” at worst.
I may be paranoid from years of maternal (and grand-maternal) warnings, but I typically compare multiple recipes from different sources to get a good feel for the sugar:fruit and sugar:liquid ratio and thus judge my target recipe accordingly. When in doubt, you can always contact the Extension Service (http://ohioline.osu.edu/lines/food.html#FOODP) or the National Center for Home Preservation (http://www.uga.edu/nchfp)
—
moo!
September 8th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I have some canning supplies, dozens of glass pint and quart canning jars I would love to give to someone who could use them, contact me at 262-1176 if interested.
September 9th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I have a tomato mill that does 600 lbs an hour.if anyone would want to rent/barter.you just boil run them thru it takes the peel and seeds out and spits out a purree.it takes longer to clean unit than the milling process but simple robert@stonedpizzacafe.biz