Canning Tomatoes

The post from a couple of days ago mentioned tomato season was getting started. It's finally time to start canning some. We've been eating tomatoes from the garden for several weeks now and giving a few away to friends, but they hadn't been piling up until recently. Getting one or two tomatoes a day isn't too bad but when they come ten to fifteen a day, they pile up quickly. Tomatoes can either be canned or frozen to preserve, but I prefer to can them.

When the process is complete the tomatoes look like the photo above, but the first step is to get them peeled. If you are only going to peel one or two tomatoes, it's simple enough to get a knife and cut the skin off. If you have 40 to 50 tomatoes, peeling with a knife will make for a long day. I am not sure where I ran across this technique since I don't remember my mother or anyone else in my family peeling tomatoes this way.

Bring a pot of water almost to a boil, just have it simmering. Make sure the pot of water is large enough to submerge each tomato individually. Rinse off a tomato and using a pair of tongs submerge it in the simmering water for twenty to thirty seconds. Retrieve the tomato from the water and give it a rinse under cold water. The tomato is only in the hot water long enough to heat the outer layer of the tomato and it just needs to be cooled to make it safe to handle with your bare hands. Now the outer layer of skin will simply peel off the tomato.

The actual time the tomato should be heated depends on how hot the water is and how ripe the tomato. When I am ready to peel a tomato in the simmering water, I simply put another in to be heating as I peel the first one. This becomes a self correcting process. If the water isn't hot enough it will take longer to peel and the next tomato spends more time in the hot water making it easier.

After peeling the tomatoes simply dice them up into a pot on the stove. I know that I will be using the tomatoes for soups, salsa, and spaghetti sauce so a rough dice is good enough.

Heating the diced tomatoes slightly will bring enough moisture out of the tomatoes to make for easy filling of the jars without trapping air bubbles in the tomatoes. This is a mixture of regular round tomatoes and paste tomatoes. For these, there is no reason to add water to the tomatoes. There is plenty of juice already there. For the difference in round and paste tomatoes, see the post Are You Growing the Correct Tomatoes?.

If you did prefer to freeze your tomatoes at this point you could simply ladle them into freezer bags or containers and pop them in the freezer. To can them, fill clean sterilized jars with the tomatoes, add the tips and rings to close the container and process through a hot water bath canning process. I have never had a problem with tomatoes going bad processed this way but if you're concerned there isn't enough acid, simply add some lime or lemon juice to be safe.