TOOOOO Many Tomatoes, Help Please

Primrose

We're also hopefully going to have a lot of surplus tomatoes this year and I'd love to can them if only I could find a source of doing this. Most of our surplus tomatoes are cooked down with onions and garlic until we've got a thick sauce, which we then whizz up with a stick blender to turn into purree, which is bagged off in different sized portions. This is used as a base for pasta sauces, caseroles, and soups. Last year I had lots of spare cherry tomatoes which I froze whole in Lakeland zipped plastic bags. I'm a great lover of bacon and tomatoes as a quick meal, and these were ideal for this purpose. I'd just grab a handful out of the bag as I needed them and defrost them in the microwave.
One year I cut a lot of them in half, oven dried them and put them in olive oil in the fridge but the oil went thick and horrible. Some I put in olive oil in jars and left them in the cupboard but they went mouldy so I wouldn't go that route again - I wasted a lot of tomatoes in the process.
Tomatoes can also be preserved in their own juice in Kilner jars but I've never tried this. I'm sure Googling for the process would provide a way of doing this.
As a girl guide many years ago in the fifties I once preserved some tomatoes in Kilner jars in brine for my Cooks badge. I don't remember them being very tasty and wouldn't recommend this route.
Roasted tomatoes frozen in small portions are delicious as roasting really drives out much of the moisture and concentrates the flavour. If you can do a large batch at a time and freeze them in small glass jars (yes, glass jars normally do freeze OK), this is a good way of preserving their flavour.
When we have a lot of surplus tomatoes, we also make home-made tomato soup with tomatoes, fried onions & garlic, whizz it down and freeze it in one pint clean plastic milk bottles. (just leave a small expansion gap for the frozen liquid to expand).

silligilli

Chilli Jam, a batch needs 500g of tomatoes. Great on burgers or with cheese on toast.

ChocClare

I was going to suggest LDS as well BUT

Tomatoes are reasonably acid - and get acid enough if you add a squirt of lemon juice...

In which case, you wouldn't need a pressure canner. Step-by-step instructions are here.

HTH

ChocClare

I've just posted a reply to Primrose about this, funnily enough.

I have roasted-and-dried, made sauce, frozen whole and canned.

What are you going to do with the tomatoes (seriously?)

If you are going to make tomato sauce, freeze the tomatoes whole as they are. When you take them out of the freezer, the skins will split and slide off WITH NO EFFORT :j so you can then use them in a tomato sauce recipe - which you can then freeze if you wish.

OR

you can roast the tomatoes in a hot oven, allow to cool, blitz, then make tomato sauce with this. Yum. Then you can freeze it

OR

you can can them at home (see instructions here)

OR

you can make tomato sauce (I keep saying this, sorry - LIKE THIS):

Chop 2 onions and a clove of garlic and a carrot or two and a stick of celery if you have it

Fry gently in a little olive oil

Add tomatoes - preferably skinned and deseeded but meh

For extra tomatoey goodness, you can add a squirt of tomato puree

Season with pepper and salt. Add a spoonful of herbes de provence if you like and a tablespoonful of olive oil.

ADD A GOOD DESSERTSPOONFUL OF SUGAR *important safety tip*

Bring to the boil (just) and then simmer until the sauce has thickened and reduced. Allow to cool and then either leave as is or blitz in the food processor.

NOW - if you add a squirt of lemon juice just to be on the safe side, you can can your tomato sauce in the same way as shown in the link above (eh? eh? Good, innit?).

If you have a proper pressure canner, you don't need the lemon juice.

If you can't be bothered to can, you can freeze it. Sainsbury's do freezer bags for liquids (stand up by themselves) which freeze very nicely.

So what I'm saying is - sauce. Yep. Sundried tomatoes not so much.

HTH

Patchwork_Quilt

Get the US Department of Agriculture Complete Guide to Home Canning and Preserving. I do mine in a pressure cooker. Have just opened some potatoes which were done a year ago and they were fine - when we got the lid off.

ISBN -13:978-0-486-40931-3

A seriously good book.

ceridwen

I've read about those communal canning facilities as well and thought what a good idea they were - but they were only available in the War. I'm hoping that they (or something along similar lines) will be resurrected.

I shall be going off to a preserves making class soon - that someone is running in their home. Not so much for the instruction - but just because I fancy doing it with other people and swopping hints and maybe doing a bit of food swopping too.

Primrose

Choc Clare and Patchwork Quilt. Thanks for your suggestions. I'll try to see if our local library can get hold of the preserving book for me. When I see the amount of money involved in investing in proper canning equipment I realise I'll probably not live long enough to get a return on my investment, so unless something turns up out of the blue on a local community canning opportunity, it looks like I'll have to stick to freezing/purreeing tomatoes and somehow squeezing more space into our freezer. I do like the idea though, of being able to preserve without relying on a freezer. Power cuts can always cause you to lose all your precious hoard of goodies.
Ceridwen - I like the idea of people running a preserving class in their own home. So many of these skills are a dying art, especially amongst younger people and seeing it done at first hand and being able to ask questions as you go along is always the best way of learning.

canspendnomore

Patchwork_Quilt wrote: »

I do mine in a pressure cooker. Have just opened some potatoes which were done a year ago and they were fine - when we got the lid off.

My Dummies book for Preserving and Canning says that it's not ok to use a pressure cooker, but you have to use a pressure canner - a similar but completely different piece of equipment. I've been worried about using a pressure cooker in case I end up with bad food. I'd love to be able to put my tomatoes etc in jars to use in the winter.

I'm very new to canning so might be being more cautious that I need to be!!

dandy-candy

Just wondering - why don't you bottle them instead of can them?

Gigervamp

It's the same thing.