Heartistic Desires

Posted By Cori on October 8, 2009

Recently I had the most lovely day bottling tomatoes that I thought I would share the process with you. This is way more “Ode to Tomatoes” than “tutorial”, so please indulge me! There’s just something about that beautiful red fruit that I can’t resist. I am grateful to have the equipment and the knowledge to preserve as many of these juicy babies as I can while they’re in season. Just look at these tomatoes!!

And these were the ‘cast offs’ from a local fruit stand! Just sad that anyone would feel the need to eliminate these little wonders. Well, I can certainly use them.

First I got out my bottles and put them in the dishwasher on the hot rinse cycle. These jars I’ve just recently washed, so I didn’t wash them again. But if it had been a while, I would have washed them first. I prefer to bottle tomatoes in pints and almost always use the wide mouth variety.

Then I washed every last one of those little red jewels. Although, admittedly, some of them were not so little. It took every large bowl in my house to hold all of them. While I was washing them, I got a large pot of water boiling so I can blanch the tomatoes. When ready to blanch, I got a large bowl of cold water with some ice in it to put the tomatoes in immediately after blanching. This stops the cooking and helps those little lovelies stay firm.

Next I blanched the tomatoes. There is a bit of a trick here. I don’t want to cook the tomatoes because that will make them mushy in the jar. I just need to loosen the skin to make it easy to remove. Most recipes say to blanch for 30 seconds or until the skins split, but I find this is too long. I tend to err on the side of caution and only blanch them for about 15 – 20 seconds. That seems to be long enough without cooking the little darlings.

And most of these tomatoes were very ripe, so their skins split fast. If the skin splits, I take it out no matter how long it’s been in the boiling water. Immediately after removing the tomatoes from the boiling water, I put them in the large pot of ice water or the ‘ice water bath’.

I was working in batches, so after a few minutes I would take the tomatoes out of the ice bath and put them in a strainer until I got around to coring and peeling them.

I used a small, sharp paring knife to remove the core, skin and any bruised or tough spots remaining.

Then I cut all the tomatoes into large chunks. The smaller tomatoes would only get cut in halves or fourths. But the larger ones I would just cut into large chunks so that all the pieces of tomato were about the same size after cutting. This is a pretty good time to start the lids heating on the stove. Remember not to boil them – just keep them good and hot until they go on the jars.

Doesn’t that make your mouth water?? I could eat the whole batch right here, right now. And I would have canker sores forever! And I wouldn’t mind because it was worth it, Baby! (Garret couldn’t resist…)

Anyway, next I got my water bath canner set up with water and about one tablespoon of vinegar and set it on the stove to start heating to a simmer. Then I got my hot jars out of the dishwasher, put them on the counter in batches of 12 and added one tablespoon of Real Lemon juice (not fresh lemon juice – use the bottled kind) to them. I like to do this first so I don’t lose track of which bottle I added it to. Then I filled them to within 1-inch of the top with tomato chunks, kind of pressing the tomatoes down into the jar a bit (but not crushing them too much – I don’t want tomato mush!). And finally, I added a scant 1/2 tsp. of salt to each jar.

After wiping the rim of each filled jar with a clean, damp cloth, I added the lids and rings (finger-tight only) and put each jar in the water bath canner as I filled it. Once the water was boiling, I lowered the jar basket into the water, put the lid on the canner, and let it boil – or ‘process’ – for 40 minutes.

Although I ended up with eight batches to process, it was a simple process that produced 44 pints of fresh, local, home-bottled tomatoes for us to use throughout the coming months. Bottling can be so satisfying! And I love the fact that I know what went into each and every jar.

Love.

Category: Food
Tags: bottling, Food, love, tomatoes