I’ve
neglected this poor old journal this summer, in part because we are inundated
with tomatoes. For the home gardener, almost every summer has its outstanding
vegetable, and this is the Year of the Tomato. We planted a dozen plants
and allowed one volunteer to grow. Three
of them went into the soil quite late and haven’t produced fruit yet. (When
we returned from Arizona and went shopping for tomato plants we couldn’t find our favorite slicer, the Abraham Lincoln. I had some seed stashed away,
and planted some, even thought the time for seed-starting tomatoes was long
past.)
Tomatoes began ripening in late
July this year, right after our girls and grandchildren visited. I was sorry
the girls missed that because both of them live in parts of our country where
tomatoes can’t be grown successfully.
At first, each tomato was a
treasure. If you’ve never eaten a home-grown tomato, you haven’t tasted a real
tomato. Soon we were eating tomatoes twice a day. I made almost every tomato
recipe I could think of from caprese salad to Summer’s End Pasta*. Then there
were so many tomatoes, I began preparing them for freezing.
Note: the ugly ones near the
foreground are the best tasting ever.
For years I canned tomatoes,
usually regular slicing tomatoes. Friends and family bragged about freezing
whole tomatoes, but the whole tomatoes I froze turned into a stringy, watery mess
as they thawed. I longed for the convenience and relative ease of freezing
tomatoes, though, and I finally hit on a method.
Realizing that the enzymes in
fresh vegetables must be inactivated before successful freezing**, I decided to
process the tomatoes just as I would before canning them, which is to blanch
the tomatoes in boiling water, strip off their skins, and reheat them. (I don’t
need whole tomatoes, so I cut mine into pieces before reheating.) I loved the
results and have been freezing partially cooked tomatoes ever since. Because of
their meatiness and low water content, I freeze paste-type tomatoes
exclusively, either Roma or San Marzano.
Here’s how it’s done,
step-by-step:
Wash the tomatoes. Cut out and discard any bad spots
on the tomatoes. Place all the tomatoes on a counter beside the stove. Fill a
2-quart saucepan two-thirds full of water and bring it to a boil. Set a large bowl
on the other side of the pot.
When the water boils, drop into
it six to eight paste tomatoes. This will briefly stop the boil. Watch for bubbles beginning to
rise from the bottom of the pot, and set a timer for one minute. When the timer
goes off, remove the tomatoes from the boiling water with a slotted spoon and
drop them into the large bowl. Continue until all your tomatoes have been
blanched.
Get out a saucepan and wait for
the blanched tomatoes to cool enough to handle comfortably. Holding each tomato
over the large bowl of blanched tomatoes, cut off its top, strip off the skin, and drop the tomato into the
waiting saucepan. Cut the each tomato into pieces if you desire. When all the
tomatoes are in the saucepan, get out a colander and set it over the saucepan.
Dump in all the tomato skins and tops and juice from the large bowl. Press and
turn the mass of peels to extract the juice and pulp. Scrape the paste from
the bottom of the colander and set it aside. (You can compost the remains or
feed them to the chickens.)
Finally turn on a burner below
the saucepan and gently bring the tomatoes and their juice to a simmer. The
idea ia not to cook the tomatoes, but to gently heat them through. When you
deem this done, turn off the heat and let the tomatoes cool down. Because my
stove is electric, I set the saucepan off the burner to cool.
When the tomatoes have cooled to room temperature,
spoon them into freezer cartons. (I use old cottage cheese cartons, or their
like.) Set the containers in the refrigerator to cool further before putting
them in the freezer.
That’s what I did this morning,
and will be doing again as the tomatoes continue to ripen. See ya later.
* This recipe appears on page 137 of the New Ksnsas Cookbook and was recently featured on that cookbook's Facebook page.
** An explanation of the effect of enzymes on frozen vegetable is readily available online. Search for "enzymes freezing vegetables."
Copyright 2017, Shirley Domer
