A New, Easy Way to Can tomatoes!

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     This year in my garden, I've planted a variety of tomatoes.  I have Beef Steak, (good for slicing on sandwiches!), San Marzanos, (really good for sauces and tomato pastes), and Ox Hearts, (heart shaped tomatoes that are good for both of the above!)  I have a couple other varieties that I'm not sure what they are called!  Sometimes they produce very strange shapes of tomatoes!  But they all taste good and when you have tomatoes coming out of your ears, I will use every kind available to make tomato sauces of different varieties.  
      Peeling tomatoes is not what I love to do though, so when someone sent me a clever idea on TikTok that eliminated peeling and hours of simmering over a hot stove, I was ready to give it a try!  

     First of all, here are my weird tomatoes that I shared with my gardening group on Facebook.  They went viral as far as private gardening groups go!  I named them "Des Tomates Religeuse."  Let me know if you get the reference.  There were a wide variety of other ideas of what they looked like! 

      To preserve your tomatoes as a tomato sauce without the long process of peeling and simmering forever, here is what you will need: 

• A blender (I love mine because it has double blades that are really good at chopping the skins until smooth and obliterating most of the seeds that get into your tomato sauce.  Mine is no longer available, but here is the newest one like it.)
• A Drink Dispenser ( I needed one of these  and my grandson, who loves Five Below found me a a gallon one for $5 there!  It is really nice and made of glass, so it would be pretty to serve punch in as well!) 

• A deep pot
• Canning jars and Lids (One gallon of tomatoes is only going to make about 4 pint jars of sauce, so if you have more tomatoes, you might want 2 dispensers.  I just got  another one, so my next batch will be larger!  This time, I had purchased some 1 1/2 pint jars that I used for my Italian Sauce because I feel like I always need a bit more than a pint, but less than a quart of sauce.  Plus, I just liked the look of the jars! )
• A ladle, funnel and other basic canning supplies
• Water Bath or Steam Canner

     I set myself up a processing line to efficiently make my tomato sauce.  
First, in the sink I have my colander full of washed tomatoes.
Next, on the counter I have a cutting board, my blender and a bowl for waste. 
Then, my dispenser is next to the blender with the lid open.  

I cut off any stems and blemishes on the tomatoes and cut them in half and put them in the blender. I fill the blender up to the max fill line on the glass. Then, I use the milk shake setting to blend the tomatoes up into a smooth consistency.

I take this tomato pulp and pour it into the juice dispenser.

     It took me 3 or 4 batches in the blender to fill the juice dispenser.  But, it goes pretty quickly.  When the dispenser is full, it will look like this: 

I could have put a few more in I guess, but those few tomatoes that are left are ripening a little more.

       Now, take this dispenser and put it in the refrigerator and let it sit in there for a day or two.  This is what will happen: 

Sorry that this is blurry. But you can see that the pulp of the tomato separates from the more watery juicy part. You know, the stuff that you usually simmer away for hours.

      With the pulp and juice separated, you can take the dispenser over to the sink and hold freezer safe containers under the spigot and turn the spigot on. Collect the juice and freeze it to use when you make soups and stews! 

Actually, saving this instead of letting it simply steam away is really a smart way to get the most out of your tomatoes! I just label and freeze it.

     At this point, on the video that I saw, the person preserving their tomatoes simply packed the pulp into freezer bags and froze the pulp to use later as tomato sauce.  But, I wanted not only tomato sauce, I wanted to make Italian sauce.  So, I took my pulp a step further.  

     After removing the liquid, I transferred the pulp into my large pot on the stove.  There will still be some liquid in it that you will want to boil out a little bit.  So, I put my pot of tomato pulp on to simmer while adding the seasonings that I wanted.  I used this recipe for Italian Sauce that I posted for you last year as my guide to making the sauce.  Even if I'm not adding seasonings but  simply canning sauce, I still put it into the pot on to simmer and added salt and bottled lemon juice.
     One tip that I will give you is to taste after you add each seasoning.  Then you will be able to tell if it needs more salt, basil or what.  If the salt is right, move on to the next ingredient.  Remember that if you want to water bath or steam process your sauce, you should use dry herbs to season it because if you put in fresh onions or peppers or basil or things like that, you will need to pressure can it, and that takes much longer.  

      I let my sauce simmer as I got my steam canner ready and sterilized my jars.  Then, I used a ladle to put it into my jars, leaving 1" of headspace.  Wipe the rims, add the lids and rings,  and put them in the canner.  When the water bath canner starts to boil or the steam canner reaches the correct temperature, begin timing.  Pints and 1 1/2 pints should process for 35 minutes.  
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One of the beauties of using the steam canner is that it takes less water and less time to get to temperature. That is nice when you are only canning a few jars anyway.

     Full Disclosure:  One of my jars didn't seal! That rarely happens to me, and I think it was because I forgot to wipe the rim of that jar!  But, no worries because I stuck it into the fridge and we will have spaghetti or lasagna or some other kind of pasta tomorrow night.  Then, I will have that jar ready to use with my next batch of tomatoes! 

     Now, doesn't that method sound easy?  It is!  The sauce tastes so great and I'm so proud of my tomato harvest! 

Other things I've been doing with my tomatoes:

• Salsa
• Fresh San Marzano Marinara Sauce with Fettuccini​