You might remember that 25 pound box of tomatoes I bought last week?
I canned them after a couple of days. I sorted them out first - good, starting to go, and gone. Luckily there were only 2 that were gone.
Next I looked up ho to can tomatoes in my handy canning cookbook.
There are really a lot of ways to can tomatoes! I jut went with a cold pack of diced tomatoes for simplicity. No cooking, no blanching/peeling, just dice and stuff in a jar.
The cookbook was really clear about using nice, firm fruit. You don't want to heat anything yucky that might be growing on your tomatoes to a high temperature and let it grow inside the jar. We had a run-in with a mysterious substance on the surface of an applesauce quart earlier this year. I just tossed the whole jar out, better safe than sorry. I opted to dice and freeze all the 'starting to go' category.
For the raw pack I just diced the tomatoes, packed them into hot jars, poured boiling water over the tomatoes, sealed, and put in the pressure canner. Some of the jars leaked out lots of their liquid, as you can see in the photo below. I did a little research online and found out it's pretty normal to lose some liquid, but you lose more if you try and cool the jars too fast. Maybe that was my problem since I was racing to finish and get somewhere on time.
So I put fresh, boiling water in those jars, resealed, and put them in the pressure canner again. They came out much better the second time around with their nice, slow cool down. The final result was 16 pints with about 8 tomatoes left in the fridge for salads this week.
I'm not sure how economical this process really is. I paid $15 and a lot of labor to get only 16 jars of tomatoes. I could have bought 14.5 oz cans of tomatoes at Fred Meyer last week for $0.50 each. At least this week I know the jars really only contain tomatoes and they are in glass jars.
Katie
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