Well, the clock is ticking, so we’re definitely starting to knock those big preservations down! This is a big one, canning up our main tomato harvest for the season!
Canned tomatoes are one of our most valuable preservations. It’s something we’d spend “real money” on if we didn’t produce our own. So, our goal is to get as much canned tomato as we possibly can each season. They’re not only super healthy and tasty, but it directly contributes to our bottom line.
We generally go for quartered tomatoes as these are the most universal across various recipes. After this big quartered canning session, sometimes we might do halves or crushed tomatoes. But, we generally like to diversify our harvest into other things like tomato soup, bloody mary mix or other tomato focused goods that also bring us a lot of value.
Canning tomatoes can be a bit of a chore, so doing bigger batches is certainly ideal. If your tomatoes aren’t coming in all at once, it might be a good idea to harvest across a couple of weeks and then can them all together. Tomatoes store reasonably well in the fridge, plus the canning process is going to obliterate any sense of texture you might lose from storing those tomatoes for a week or so.
This was certainly our most complicated preservation yet in our new outdoor preservation space! While it’s a bit of a pain to hoof everything from the kitchen to the outdoors and back, we’re definitely appreciating the additional workspace over our somewhat small kitchen. Tomato canning typically pushes our kitchen to the max, so having larger worktops and space to move around it was golden.
We’re glad to be crossing this one off the list! We haven’t figured out what our second big tomato preservation batch will be just yet, but we usually lean towards using our food mill to process our tomatoes. We’ve only been milling food for a few years now, so we appreciate a chance to get a bit of extra practice.
We’re excited to bring 10 quarts of quartered tomatoes into the winter! Our plants are still producing quite well, it’s looking like we’ll be able to get three separate harvests and that’s going to be awesome!
