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."

Copyright 2017, Shirley Domer

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

Low Impact Week, Day Four

No Impact Week was halfway over before I discovered that each day has a different emphasis. I feel bad about having driven to town and back on Tuesday, which was supposed to emphasize walking or biking everywhere. Maybe traveling on a foot-powered scooter would qualify, too.

I made up for Tuesday on Wednesday – local food day. The way I figure, food you already have on hand should qualify as local food, even if it includes dried cranberries. I made a big batch of granola. The best thing I can claim about the granola is that all the ingredients were purchased in bulk sections of grocery stores, so there’s no packaging waste and there are no empty cartons from prepared cereals to recycle.

For lunch we had potato leek soup with fresh parsley garnish. I’m happy to say that everything in it except a bit of half and half came from our garden.

Finally, I prepared a basket of Roma tomatoes for freezing.

They scalded for 30 to 45 seconds in boiling water.

Then they went into a bowl of ice water to keep them from getting mushy.

The tomato skins slipped right off. Then I cut each fruit into smaller pieces, and simmered them to stop their natural enzymes’ action. After they cooled I put them in old cottage cheese cartons and froze them. I was thinking tomato bisque soup, vegetable soup, pasta sauce, chili, and a favorite, tomatoes baked with breadcrumbs and butter.

These three principles guided me:

            Use what you have,

            Eat what is fresh, and

            Preserve the surplus.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer