Canning up tomato sauce
Last week we harvested a total of 85 pounds of tomatoes from the greenhouse. We ended up sharing 42 pounds with friends, family and neighbors, leaving us with a more manageable 43 pounds to process and preserve. We had a busy schedule, so I wanted to get them put up as quickly and easily as possible. We ended up electing to make tomato sauce with them.
Here are the last 43 pounds ready to become delicious tomato sauce.
A few years ago we bought an attachment for our meat grinder that is a juicer. It was a terrific investment considering we already had the grinder. It has SIGNIFICANTLY reduced our labor and time in juicing up tomatoes for making juice or thickening up for a sauce.
Here is our setup and a nearly full 16 quart pot of tomato juice ready to simmered and thickened up for sauce.
Some lessons we learned with the juicer attachment, run the skins through several times until the skins are almost dry. Running them through just once leaves a lot of juice in them. Once we had a full pot of juice we moved it to the stove and allowed it to simmer for 24 hours. The house smelled amazing! When it was done we had lost 1/3rd of the volume and it had thickened up to a nice sauce consistency. We ended up with 8 quarts of the the tomato sauce to add to our pantry.
Here you can see our grinder setup running.
After watching your video, I had to go to ebay to see what is available for a juicer that works like yours does. There's a few hand crank types that have the same mechanism as your electric one. I'm going to have to order one of those, it'll be faster than the simple one that I have right now. :-)
There are some great juicers out there, even a few that are electric. The electric ones can be a little expensive, around $100 when I last looked. but they really speed up the process if you have a lot of tomatoes to process. What variety of tomatoes do you grow?
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Oh my those tomatoes look delicious!
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Thank you. They are amazing. I assert that when you feed them ALL the nutrients they need the taste is so much better.
I got a brand new Squeezo on BuyNothing last year and I LOVE it for making sauces. I also run the residue through 2 - 4 times until dry. I get a decent amount of addition sauce this way.
Those are a great unit. That was our plan B if the grinder attachment didn't work out well. We can get almost a 3rd more juice by running the residue several times.
That is an awesome harvest!
Thank you. It was all grown using the Mittleider method. Since we started gardening with it we have been able to grow more food in less space than with a traditional garden.
this is great!
I am reading this on day nine.
I can't give reSTEEM.
I imagine the aroma throughout the house.Hummmm
Stay cool!