Nicole Is Cooking

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On our way home from NJ Fantôme Chocolat and I stopped at one of my usual farm stands to buy tomatoes. We got ~30 pounds of plum tomatoes.

One thing I knew we were absolutely doing, which I had never done before, was oven-dried tomatoes. They are like sun-dried, except they are oven-dried, obviously. I am not a huge fan of sun-dried, but for some reason, reading Baklava Queen’s mention of them in The Ethicurean then reading her original entry on them just made me know we had to have them. Fantôme Chocolat did not disagree.

We cut, cored, and de-seeded enough tomatoes to fill 4 8×10 cookie sheets. Before spreading them out on the cookie sheets, the tomatoes were tossed with some olive oil, salt, and thyme.

The tomatoes were dried in a 200 degree oven. Some took only 10 hours. Some took closer to 16 hours. In the end, we were left with ~4.5 cups of dried tomatoes.

I packed the tomatoes into 3 half pint jars and poured olive oil over them and stored them in the refrigerator.

Just last week though, I was in the car and someone called The Splendid Table to ask about making sun-dried tomatoes. Lynne Rossetto Caspar recommends storing them in the freezer and not oil packing them because of potential botulism issues. Fantôme Chocolat and I talked about this and decided to take our chances. Baklava Queen really appears to have her act together on canning. I am still going to goggle this a bit, but from my experience there is a lot of “scare” information out there on potential issues with canning. Fantôme Chocolat also said it is a good reason to eat them really fast and then make more. He does have a point. If we get botulism I will let you know.

Obviously, that didn’t make much of a dent in 30 pounds of tomatoes. Normally I make a huge batch of sauce and cook that, but it was getting into Sunday afternoon by now and I wanted to get the canning done. Sauce would need at least a day to cook. I decided the rest of the tomatoes would be diced and pureed since that would also give me a little more flexibility throughout the winter too.

For diced tomatoes, you need to remove the skins and seeds from the tomatoes. To do this, first put the tomatoes in boiling water about a minute. Then transfer the tomatoes to an ice water bath. Once the tomatoes are cool to the touch, you should be able to easily remove the skin with your fingers.

You can then slice the tomatoes, removing the core, seeds, and all bad spots. Dice your tomatoes and place them in jars. The jars should be filled with liquid once they are complete. This can either be hot water or even a watered down tomato puree (I use hot water). For the most part, tomatoes are acidic enough to can without any further acid. However, there are some heirlooms and low acid tomatoes that can be too low in acid to safely can using hot water processing without adding some additional acid to them. When in doubt, adding some lemon juice (about 1 teaspoon per quart) is typically enough to provide the necessary pH level and it will not affect the taste of the food. If you are going to can tomatoes, I recommend you read up on this and decide what to do.

I ended up making 10 pints of diced tomatoes.

For pureed tomatoes, I always go over each tomato first and cut out any bad spots or throw away rotting tomatoes. You don’t want to introduce potential bacteria from rot into your jars. I then give each tomato a little squeeze as I put it into a big stock pot. Then I bring the tomatoes to a boil. You don’t need to cook them thoroughly- the goal is to heat them enough so they start to break down and can be processed easier.

Once the tomatoes are softened (you may need to work in batches) you need to process them. Do not discard any of the liquid you have from the stock pot or containers you have your warm tomatoes sitting in– this will not become part of the puree but it is still usable! To process the tomatoes, you need a food mill or some type of fruit/ vegetable strainer. I use the fruit and vegetable strainer attachment that is made for Kitchen Aid stand mixers. Alternately, you can remove all the skin and seeds by hand (which I used to do and with 50 pounds of tomatoes takes a really, really long time).

Process the tomatoes according to the device directions in order to remove the skin, core, and seeds. I have found that the Kitchen Aid attachment isn’t the most efficient device and tends to discard a lot of pulp from the tomatoes that is still good.

As a result, I process the extruded waste a second time in order not to waste any tomato. After the second processing, it is obvious the extruded waste is really only the parts you don’t want in your puree. You get a much drier and more compact bundle of skin and seeds.

While inside the strainer, you get a meatier puree that is similar in consistency to a tomato paste.

It is well worth the effort to process the first batch of “waste”. In the end, I ended up with 9 quarts of tomato puree and 1 quart of broth. The puree will become tomato sauce and tomato soup later in the year.

Broth? Yes, tomato broth. All the “tomato water” that is in the stock pot you heated the tomatoes in and whatever containers you kept them in while you processed makes an excellent broth. Strain any skin and seeds out that may have ended up in here and you will find that the liquid is thinner than the puree and too thin for a tomato soup but it is similar to a vegetable broth. I plan on using mine to make some Minestrone this winter.

(And along those waste not want not lines… and rotted veggies we came across for every item we canned went to the compost pile at my CSA farm. None of the scraps were thrown in the garbage!)

Tomato Total (in quarts):
Oven-dried Tomatoes: .75 quarts
Diced Tomatoes: 2.5 quarts
Tomato Puree: 9 quarts
Tomato Broth: 1 quart