Canning Tomatoes

I'm pretty proud of my garden.  We harvested about 175 lbs of produce this year, with about 140 of that being tomatoes.  EXCELLENT!  Of course, the tomatoes didn't all come in at once; they trickled in around 30 lbs a week or so.  Perfectly manageable for the first year of my garden...but I hope to increase production for next year.

So what to do with them?  True to my relatively new-found Betty Crocker skills...I canned them.  And why shouldn't I?  We use diced tomatoes like crazy at my house, and at $1.79 per 14.5 oz for the organic brands, I figured I could make my own organic diced tomatoes for a whole lot less.  And now that we're eating what I've canned, I can enthusiastically say that there is NO comparison between my tomatoes and those you buy in the store!

Sure, it might be the hard work talking.  But I doubt it.  There's a certain depth and complexity to the flavors of my diced tomatoes that I've never experienced from the store-bought kind.

I ended up canning 21 pints of diced tomatoes, which has a retail value of about $42.  Not a bad savings, considering I spent only $6 on seed.  Of course, time is money...but I don't count that, because gardening and canning are hobbies, a labor of love that fill me with immense satisfaction...and a way to eliminate those free hours alone while my husband is diligently studying to earn his Master's degree.

Before canning any product, pre-processing has to happen first.  In the case of tomatoes, this involves washing, cutting out the core and any bad spots, scooping out the seeds with a finger, and blanching them in boiling water to get the skins to come off.  Not hard work, by any means, but it can be tedious after the first 30 lbs.  Enter the iPod and Pandora radio, those magical inventions to dispel tedium!  Put on some fun dance music, and I get a workout while my canning gets done!

If I'm feeling REALLY industrious, I'm usually making bread at the same time as doing my canning.  And why not?  Bread requires no babysitting once it gets started, and rises quickly in a nice steamy kitchen.  Baking requires the oven; canning, the stove.  It's going to get hot and take a few hours anyway, so you might as well pull your hair back, put on a tank top and shorts, and make your appliances earn their keep.  Go big or go home, right?

My pre-processing setup looks something like this:  freshly washed and weighed tomatoes on the right; cutting board, knife, goop bowl, and compost receptacle in the center; clean cookie tray for keeping runaway tomatoes and their juices in check on the left.

Once my sauce pot of boiling water (aka the blanch bucket) has reached a nice rolling point, I'll drop in a few tomatoes, 4 - 5 at a time, and set the timer for 45 seconds.  After that, they get pulled out and dropped into an ice bath to stop them from cooking.  When the tomatoes have cooled enough to touch, I put them in a colander over a bowl to drain any excess water.

The skins should just fall off practically on their own by this point.  If not, don't stress; those were unripe parts of the tomato, and you don't want to keep those parts anyway; they're tough, white, and flavorless.  I squeeze the remaining good parts of the tomatoes into quarters and drop the pieces into a soup pot.

To can them, I use what's called the "hot pack" method.  It's where you heat whatever food you happen to be processing in the jars so you get more food volume per jar.  A cost-saving measure, really, to prevent you from buying/sterilizing more jars than absolutely necessary.  It also cuts down on the time you need to process your jars in the water-bath canner, which is fine by me.  For tomatoes, simply add enough water to barely cover them, heat to a boil, and let the whole thing boil there for 5 minutes.

At the end of 5 minutes, your tomatoes are ready to be ladled into their sterilized, warm jars.  It's very important that each pint receives 1/2 tsp of canning salt and 1 TBS of bottled lemon juice BEFORE you ladle in any tomatoes.  The salt acts as a preservative, and the lemon juice increases the acidity to prevent the growth of C. botulinum, a bacteria that causes a paralytic illness called botulism.  Canning is a science, but it isn't rocket science; just follow the processing directions to the letter and use your common sense when inspecting the contents before eating them, and it's perfectly safe.

Once the jars have been filled with only 1/4" headspace, place them in a water-bath canner and boil hard for 40 minutes.  Remove the jars and allow them to cool for 24 hours on a towel-covered counter.  If you did everything right, you should hear the tell-tale POP of the jar being vacuum-sealed.  If you didn't hear one; it's not that big of a deal, just put that jar into the refrigerator and use it within the month.  The others can be stored at room temperature in a pantry for up to a year.



Happy canning!