Canning Tomatoes

This past Saturday we broke out the canning supplies and put up about 35 lbs. of tomatoes. Our plants didn't exactly produce as we'd hoped (though they're at it now, and will probably give us enough for a couple of loads of sauce, which we'll freeze), so we went to Swart's Gardens and bought two boxes of seconds and first run tomatoes - $1.50/lb or $0.75/lb for seconds.

We decided against making sauce since I mucked up about 20 lbs worth last year, and we didn't feel like hauling out the food mill. Instead we just quartered the suckers and called it a day. It's easier to make sauce from the canned tomatoes as needed anyway. We ended up with 9 quarts and 13 pints - a pretty good start, I may say.

Here's a step by step of the process from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, illustrated by us:

Quantity: An average of 21 pounds is needed per canner load of 7 quarts; an average of 13 pounds is needed per canner load of 9 pints. A bushel weighs 53 pounds and yields 15 to 21 quarts-an average of 3 pounds per quart.

Procedure for hot or raw tomatoes filled with water in jars: Wash tomatoes. Dip in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds or until skins split; then dip in cold water. Slip off skins and remove cores. Leave whole or halve. Add bottled lemon juice or citric acid to jars. Umm, we totally forgot to do this. Hopefully we'll survive. Crap. Add 1 teaspoon of salt per quart to the jars, if desired. We don't add salt.

Blanching

Dipping in ice bath

Peeling and coring


Packing in jars

Raw pack: Heat water, for packing tomatoes, to boiling. Fill hot jars with prepared raw tomatoes, leaving ½-inch headspace. Cover tomatoes in the jars with boiling water, leaving ½-inch headspace. Also remove air bubbles - they don't mention this.

Packed tomatoes before adding water Removing air

Process: Adjust lids and process in a boiler water canner - 45 minutes for quarts, 40 minutes for pints.

Processing the jars, then Sal lifts them out

Voila! The finished product.