Nothing wrong with these tomatoes!
I went to the farmers market for the first time a few weeks ago. We've spent a lot of time just trying to move in and get settled. We did grow some tomatoes, and most of them are in the freezer, waiting to be processed later. When I got to the farmers market, the very first booth I saw had boxes of vine ripened canning tomatoes on sale. I don't know what the prices are where you guys are, but here, $13 per box of organic, vine ripe, tomatoes seemed like a really good deal. So I bought two.
The plan was to make sauce, juice, diced tomatoes and dried tomatoes. The first thing I did was wash them all and pull out some to slice for dried tomatoes.
Making dried tomatoes is super easy. Just slice into medium thick slices and lay flat, not overlapping on your dehydrator trays.
If you don't have a food dehydrator, you can sun dry them by laying out in the hot afternoon sun, or put in the oven at about 140 degrees for 10 - 12 hours.
Once they're completely dry, you get a nice container of dehydrated deliciousness! You can throw some in the food processor, chop to a fine powder, and use as a replacement for tomato paste! Works great as a thickener!
Next it was time to prep for our diced tomatoes and tomato sauce. Again, I sorted through the tomatoes, picking the most firm ones to make into diced tomatoes.
To process, I first cored the tomatoes, sliced and X into the bottom of each one, and blanched them for 30 seconds and peeled them. (Drop the tomatoes into a pot of boiling water, and after 30 seconds, remove from boiling water and drop into an bowl of ice and water. The peeling will fall away easily.)
Dice the tomatoes, but not super finely. You want them to have some "meat" to them.
Add a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of lemon to pint jars, and then add the diced tomatoes. Add boiling water to each jar, leaving a half inch of head space - and water bath can for 35 minutes.
Next on our agenda was our tomato sauce. As an added benefit, we can also get our tomato juice finished at the same time.
The thing I enjoy most about this method of making tomato sauce, is that I don't have to wait as long. Because I remove the juice, the sauce thickens quickly!
I don't drink the tomato juice. It is very thin. I like to use it for flavoring soups and sauces. If you want to make tomato juice to drink, you'll want to use a different method.
Side note - make sure you add lemon and salt (if desired) to any tomato product that you are water bath canning. If you are new to canning, I would recommend getting a recipe from my favorite canning book - Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving... (you can get them second hand for a pretty good price)
Hope you're having a good one! Talk soon!
