Tomato Season Opens with a BANG!

I spent the day with my tomatoes.

Not all were from my garden, but they are all heading for the pantry.

I bought two five pound bags of roma tomatoes at the farmer’s market for four dollars each.  Di’s gardening guru of a guy let me raid his patch too.  He gave me some small, round, Italian tomatoes and some “Viva Italia” and “San Marzano” paste tomatoes.  I have four quarts of chopped tomatoes, two cans of “whole” tomatoes (really, they are quartered), and one quart of tomato sauce.

A great tutorial for tomato processing can be found at http://storageskills.blogspot.com/2009/08/preparing-tomatoes-for-canning.html. 

I made a few minor adjustments.  Instead of cooking down the tomatoes, I packed the chopped or quartered tomatoes in jars, and topped the jars with the reserved juice from peeling and seeding the tomatoes.  I added very little juice to the four jars of chopped tomatoes and much more the jars of quartered tomatoes.  I reduced all the extra juice into sauce and put that in the final quart jar and then processed the lot altogether.

I very purposefully collected the juice of the tomatoes by employing a couple of colanders and a food mill, see Mirro Foley 2-Quart Stainless Steel Food Mill.  I peeled, cored, and seeded the tomatoes into a colander over a bowl and chopped the tomato meat I intended to can into another colander over another bowl.  I reserved the drained juices to top off the jars of chopped and quartered tomatoes.  I processed the skins, pulps, and seeds through the food mill and reduced that for the tomato sauce.  The remaining skins and seeds were a great snack for the chickens.

I could have canned the juice as juice, but I still have the juice I canned last year.  As far as improving upon last year’s tomato canning effort, I was careful to remove as many seeds as possible and I hope that the addition of the juice will give this year’s canned tomatoes a more tomato-y taste.

It is alot of work, but I spent my day in the kitchen with my family checking on my progress.  The house smells fabulous.  I have seven quarts of organically grown tomatoes for twelve dollars.   These beautiful jars just look like summer to me.

I still have another twenty pounds of tomatoes to can with lots still ripening on the vines.  I’m looking forward to some late summer days of salsa and spaghetti sauce with many more cans of chopped, quartered, and pureed tomatoes.  I can never get enough of them!