One of the joys of gardening is to be able to eat fresh produce we grew ourselves. I also like to grow enough extra so I can preserve my favorite foods for the winter. The three foods I like to have on my shelf include pizza sauce in 1/2 pint jars, sweet pickle relish in pints and the pickled 4-bean salad in pints. (see https://marykisner.com/revised-four-bean-salad-recipe-for-canning/ )
Each of those foods are things we use and if we don’t grow it, the farmer’s market usually has an abundance of tomatoes, cucumbers and green and yellow beans at some point in the summer.
I work around the available volume of produce to decide when it’s time to can. Right now, we have way too many tomatoes to just eat them…they would spoil even if we both eat 1-2 tomatoes every day! However, the pile is not quite enough to make a batch of pizza sauce to can.
So, we eat what we can work into our meals, and before the tomatoes rot on the counter, I cook and freeze the rest. When I have enough frozen to make a batch of pizza sauce, I thaw out the cooked tomatoes and continue on with the recipe. I now have about 11 pints of cooked tomatoes frozen.
I will continue cooking tomatoes in smaller batches for another week or two. when I see tomatoes being sold at the farmer’s market by the box or bushel, I’ll decide if I want to save my frozen tomatoes for soup and other recipes, or clean out the freezer and use them to make the pizza sauce. I have choices! If you’d like to see how I make the pizza sauce I posted about it here in 2021: https://marykisner.com/time-to-make-pizza sauce/.
In case you don’t do projects like this, here are some pictures of how I cook the tomatoes to freeze.
First, the tomatoes are washed. Then I cut off the top of each tomato and score an X on the bottom.
I drop them gently into boiling water for about 1 minute to loosen the skin.
Then I move the tomatoes to a bowl of ice water. That stops the cooking action and really gets the skin to start peeling back.
Then I take each tomato, peel off the skin and chop the tomato into chunks. I place the chunks into a pot on the stove. Our tomatoes are pretty solid, so I add about 1 cup of water and let the tomatoes simmer and soften slowly. I the temperature is too hot at the beginning, the tomatoes will burn at first…ruins the whole batch! Ask me how I know!!
It takes about 2-3 hours on low to boil off some of the water and get the tomatoes cooked.
I scoop the cooked tomatoes into freezer boxes and put them in the freezer.
At least the tomatoes are safe in the freezer until I decide if I want to use them to make pizza sauce later. For now…it’s back to the garden to pick some more tomatoes! Enjoy!
