Putting Tomatoes By

Tomato season soon will draw to its end, but in the meantime our plants are still cranking out tomatoes. Because we don’t prune our tomato plants the tomatoes increase in number but decrease in size. Just yesterday I manage to clear most of the heaped-up tomatoes from out kitchen worktable, saving back a dozen to give Barb for making fresh tomato pasta salad. Today Dennis brought in more tomatoes. He picks them when they begin to turn red so the birds won't peck them

I used to can tomatoes by the quart and still have the blue enamel water-bath canner in the basement. I used it once to trap a snake that got into the basement, but haven’t canned tomatoes for several years. It’s much easier to freeze them.

Some people I know say, “You can freeze fresh tomatoes whole. When they thaw, the skins slip right off.” That is true, but the tomato flesh turns into a stringy mess that is difficult to chop.*

I have far better luck by preparing tomatoes for freezing the same way I did for canning. It’s a simple process: drop the tomatoes a small batch at a time into boiling water for a minute. Remove them to a big bowl and let them cool enough to handle. Using a paring knife, cut around the stem, invert the tomato over a cooking pot, and squeeze the pulp out of the skin. Cut each tomato into chunks. When all the tomatoes are skinned, set the pot on a burner and bring the tomatoes to a steady simmer for about 10 minutes. The idea is to begin to break down the cellular structure.

At this point if I were canning tomatoes, I would ladle them into hot, sterilized quart jars, add caps and lids, and process them in a boiling water bath. Now that I’ve switched to freezing, I just set the pot off the burner and wait until the tomatoes have cooled to room temperature.

Old dairy containers of various sizes make great freezer containers. They just need identifying labels taped onto their lids. I will hand-write labels for the three quarts of tomatoes in this batch, but when I’m making a lot of the same thing, I print labels, as when Dennis went on a wild plum jelly-making spree a couple of days ago. Tomorrow we’re planning to make even more, so these labels will come in handy.

Now we’ve frozen 25 containers of tomatoes. This fall, winter, and spring we’ll be going to the basement for tomatoes to add to soups and stews and sauces. Several times we will have home-made cream of tomato soup, remembering the bountiful garden of 2014.

* Green beans, too, that have been completely precooked before freezing taste far better than green beans frozen after only blanching.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer