Mark Bittman on Easy Tomato Preserving

[BakerAunt]

I get Mark Bittman's email newsletter, and today's had this article. Note: I haven't watched the video because of the anti-tracking notice, but the article gives the information.

https://heated.medium.com/preserving-the-last-of-the-summer-tomatoes-8f473a46755e

My concern is that whole tomatoes take up a LOT more room than when first made into sauce.

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[Mike Nolan]

One reason whole tomatoes take up so much space is that they're round, so if you freeze them you wind with a lot of air gaps. The other is that the juice is mostly water.

I did around 40 pounds of tomatoes last weekend:

I think they would have come close to filling up my 24 quart pot.

I wound up with about 15 quarts of juice and pulp, plus I filled 2 one-gallon bags with the seeds and skin that the Roma sauce maker separated out. (I'll use those to make beef stock over the winter.) The 15 quarts reduced down to about 8-9 quarts of tomato sauce.

The year that I put in several black cherry tomato plants I wound up picking HUNDREDS of cherry-sized tomatoes. I would throw them in boiling water for a few seconds, then bag them for the freezer. I used them to make stock.

I'm running out of freezer space for containers of tomato sauce, but will probably have two more good harvest cycles, depending on when the first frost hits. I might blanch and freeze a few whole tomatoes, though I'm not sure where they'd go in the freezers.

The tomatoes have been fairly small this year, partly because of the varieties I chose. If I get enough larger ones (the Amish Paste ones are great, up to 10 ounces each), I might make a few bags of concassed tomatoes (skinned and seeded.)

[RiversideLen]

I have frozen whole tomatoes in the past. It's easy and it's easy to use when you want them. While still frozen, take a paring knife and cut out the core (careful for your fingers), run under a little cold water and the skin comes off. If you have the freezer space and don't have time to preserve them some other way, it's good. Turning them into sauce first is my preferred way as it does take up a LOT less space.

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