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Feature Articles: Cooking and Produce
Safely Preserve Your Home-Grown TomatoesTammy Roberts, MS, RD, LD,
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If you’re lucky you’re getting delicious fresh tomatoes from your garden. If you’re even luckier, you have extra that you want to preserve for the months you can’t walk outside and pick fresh from the garden. There are several things to consider when thinking about preserving your tomatoes safely.
Vine-ripened, disease-free, firm tomatoes are the best for canning. Most tomatoes aren’t as acidic as they used to be so you need to add acid to home-canned tomatoes. Add two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice per quart of tomatoes; one tablespoon for pints. You can use four tablespoons of 5% vinegar per quart (two tablespoons per pint) of tomatoes instead of lemon juice but that can cause undesirable flavor changes.
To remove skins from tomatoes, wash and dip into boiling water for 30-60 seconds or until the skins split. (Dipping them with a cheesecloth pouch works well.) Then, dip the tomatoes in cold water, remove the skins and cores and crush, half or leave whole.
Whole, halved or crushed tomatoes can be hot or raw packed and processed in a pressure or boiling water canner. Pressure canned tomatoes don’t look as pretty as tomatoes canned in a boiling water canner but the pressure-canned tomatoes are a higher-quality, more nutritious product. You can add one teaspoon of canning salt if desired. Leave ½ inch of headspace.
If using the pressure canner method, crushed tomatoes should be hot packed. Pints and quarts can be processed for 20 minutes at six pounds of pressure or for 15 minutes at 11 pounds of pressure. Hot or raw-packed whole or halved tomatoes packed in water in pints or quarts can be processed for 15 minutes at six pounds of pressure or 10 minutes at 11 pounds of pressure.
To process in a boiling-water canner, whether they are hot or raw packed, pints should be processed for 40 minutes and quarts for 45 minutes. If you are more than 1,000 feet above sea level, increase that time by five minutes. Most of Barton County is not above 1,000 feet. The southeast tip of the county is the only area that is about 1,000 feet.
For maximal nutritional value, it is recommended that you use your home-canned produce within one year. That shouldn’t be hard when you think about all of the things you can do with your home-canned tomatoes.
Last update: Monday, September 25, 2006
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