tomato sauce – Garden Rat

I did some tomato sauce processing this morning. I actually had two big giant batches. I had my dutch oven and my big pot going together at one point. The pictures below is after I cleaned it mostly up and it was just simmering down with the last batch. There was tom sauce literally everywhere before I cleaned, so I’ll keep that mess as a memory snapshot.

*Toma Toes sauce and jars waiting to be filled.*

In hindsight, with ten 16oz jars I could have canned it up, but I think I need more research. Since I don’t eat onions or garlic because they are my mortal gastroenterology enemy, it makes finding approved and safe recipes harder. So many of them have so many onions in them.

I also don’t really want to add any acid to them, like you would do with water batch or pressure canning, because my wife has GERD already. I don’t need to throw more fuel on that fire.

Instead, I just blanched them like before, and peeled and cored out the stems. I then just cooked them down. I initially mashed them with a potato masher, and when I had cooked them down to a close to desired thickness, I used my immersion blender to blend the remaining solid toms, and some basil and green onions in from the garden. (Green onions don’t have it in for me, so I can reasonably eat those.)

Then I just filled the jars, labeled and froze them.

I am initially freezing them in the house freezer, but then I will take some out to the chest freezer later, as I won’t have to worry about them falling over then.

*Ten jars of Toma Toes sauce waiting to freeze in the freezer. Also, so many Costco corn dogs. So so many.*

My last task fo the day is reheating some of the pickle brine I had left over from last time, and doing one last 16 oz jar of pickles with the last of my cucumbers from the garden.

*Brine and cucumbers slices waiting to become refrigerator pickles.*

I did not get a big enough harvest of these, or enough at one time to even bother with canning pickles. Refrigerator pickles work just as well, and are just as good.

Now, that I am done, I am going down for a good long nap. I am still exhausted from surgery. It’s very true, when you get over 50, these things take longer to come back from.

There are only two of us in my household, and one of us had GERD and does not eat tomatoes much at all. That’s a lot for one, and maybe a half person at best.

I have a lot of toms coming up in the garden. This is after giving a big bag away two both my side neighbors. There’s more coming. It’s by far my most successful crop.

However, My experiment with freezing them was kinda sorta successful. They are so filled with juice, that a 16 oz frozen can of whole tom’s is more like an 8 oz can with another 8 oz’s of juice.

So I am going to cook it all down in a giant pot of crushed tomatoes and freeze it after I have cooked out some of the juice. It’ll take a few hours, but at last when I pull a 16 oz jar from the freezer, I will have something that will be usable like a 16 oz store-bought can without additional fussing.

I’m going to do the same boil and skin process before, but instead of tossing them directly into jars, I will toss them in a pot to cook down.

You know, once I go out and collect today’s pile, to add to this.

Tag: tomato sauce

Frozen Tomato Harvest

Incoming Tomatoes!