What are you canning now?

[Beekissed]

Murphy's law:
"ALL of your best vegetables will fully ripen and be ready to can on those days where you have the busiest schedules/deadlines."
It IS the LAW.

Exactly. Always.

 

[Beekissed]

Cooking down maters for sauce today...house smells good! Cleaned out some canned goods, moved older stuff forward, newer stuff to the back, etc. Emptied out some stuff no one will ever eat to make room for things that are more used and useful.

 

[ducks4you]

Cooking down maters for sauce today...house smells good! Cleaned out some canned goods, moved older stuff forward, newer stuff to the back, etc. Emptied out some stuff no one will ever eat to make room for things that are more used and useful.

Do you drain the juice? I was considering buying a hand blender, but I already own a Kitchen Aid. What is your advice, since I will be canning the (yet still green and getting bigger by the day) tomatoes in my garden?

 

[flowerbug]

we never cook them down. we just can them as chunks and then what they get used for can absorb that juice/flavor. once in a while if Mom wants tomato sauce to be thicker we'll just pick up some tomato paste and use that instead.

if your main use of tomatoes is for sauce then there are varieties of tomatoes geared more towards that use (romas, etc.) and that can save a lot of time and energy to not have to remove all that liquid.

to me so much of the flavor of a tomato is in the juice around the seeds (including the umami flavor) that the idea of throwing that away is, well, just plain wrong... but to each their own...

oh, and yes, we do can tomato juice too at times...

 

[Prairie Rose]

I do puree when I can tomatoes, and it ends up somewhere between tomato juice and tomato sauce from the store. It's faster than cutting/chunking/peeling tomatoes, and 90% of the tomatoes I use end up pureed somehow.

...mostly I just despise peeling tomatoes. It's far easier to just quarter them, throw them in a pot for a few minutes till soft, then run them through the food mill.

 

[Beekissed]

Do you drain the juice? I was considering buying a hand blender, but I already own a Kitchen Aid. What is your advice, since I will be canning the (yet still green and getting bigger by the day) tomatoes in my garden?

What I normally do is wash the tomatoes, core and cut out bad spots, chunk them and run them through the blender, then strain the seeds out. No removal of the skins at all as the blender really cuts those so fine you'll never see one. It's a Ninja.

Then cook them down on low in the crock pot...leaving the lid off lets the excess fluid evaporate easily, so no skimming of extra fluid is needed. These are not sauce tomatoes at all, just extra tomatoes that needed used but I wanted to can them up as something we will actually use. Soup and sauce are two of the ways we use them the most. I love salsa and used to make it each year but since I can no longer eat tomatoes and I was the one that ate it the most, there's no point.

I'll usually add Italian seasoning or appropriate herbs and sea salt prior to canning them, but won't add garlic until I actually use it. I like the garlic taste to be pretty fresh.

 

[flowerbug]

i found out that with our food mill it takes about the same amount of time to do them as chunks and peeling them as compared to doing juice. it's not a powered version and the handle is broken so it is pretty labor intensive to crank. we've not been doing much juice since it broke.

this season almost all of the tomatoes are oddly shaped and have a lot of inclusions that need to be cut out. not as bad as a year we had before like this, but still time intensive compared to years where the tomatoes are more round formed.

there's a lot of hard stem going far down into the tomatoes.

of three buckets of tomatoes picked i have a full bucket of discarded skins/cores/rejects/etc. that's about half a bucket more than normal. the worms will take care of them, but i hate wasting so much. if juiced we probably would have had a few more quarts, but not that much.

this is a new variety of beef steaks for us and i'm going to tell the greenhouse folks that they weren't as good as the Ball Beefsteaks - they have been less disease resistant. even with the weather we've had not being the best for the start of the season they really haven't done that well at all.

at least the flavor is ok.

a lot of the tomatoes are well over a pound each. a few have been over two pounds.

we picked half of them yesterday and i put up 17 quarts. will do it again today with what is left to be picked for now. in another 4 days we'll have the third round.

 

[digitS']

oddly shaped and have a lot of inclusions that need to be cut out...
there's a lot of hard stem going far down into the tomatoes.

I have that in the early beefsteaks, 'Bug. I'll call them early because so few have ripened on the plants. What's on the vines and green look okay but we will see if they split. Which they shouldn't because they have plenty of soil moisture buuut ... An exception is the Early Girls with their characteristic early plum size and shape and the cherries .!! The little ones are just fine shape/flavor while the big varieties are taking too long to ripen.

There are some yellow shoulders, too. I'm hoping that it was just the sunny, hot days in the high 90's that's doing it. Lots of white core to cut away under the ones that look that way. I'd really like to see some perfect big beefsteaks showing up ~ heirlooms and all ~ to lift my tomato-loving spirit. Think I'll go eat some cherries.

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

I have that in the early beefsteaks, 'Bug. I'll call them early because so few have ripened on the plants. What's on the vines and green look okay but we will see if they split. Which they shouldn't because they have plenty of soil moisture buuut ... An exception is the Early Girls with their characteristic early plum size and shape and the cherries .!! The little ones are just fine shape/flavor while the big varieties are taking too long to ripen.

There are some yellow shoulders, too. I'm hoping that it was just the sunny, hot days in the high 90's that's doing it. Lots of white core to cut away under the ones that look that way. I'd really like to see some perfect big beefsteaks showing up ~ heirlooms and all ~ to lift my tomato-loving spirit. Think I'll go eat some cherries.

Steve

a lot of the tomatoes are curled around the stem so it is nearly impossible to remove the fruit easily. it is like three tomatoes stuck together and all of them pretty big. i'm sure some of them have been close to 3 lbs.

 

[digitS']

Whoa!

If a 3# tomato was on one of my plants,

.. it would probably scare me!

Steve