Chicken Creek Journal: Freezing Tomatoes

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."