Tomatoes for the Winter: Canning Time!

Now we are getting into my very favorite part of summer, the part where every time you look out at the tomato vines you see them all shiny with red globes, like a midsummer Christmas tree. Now the tomatoes are finally producing enough that I can actually get some into the house before I eat them all straight off the vine.

This is the time of year when you remember that tomatoes are more than just a component. They're these marvels of sweet and sour and savory; they taste like concentrated sunlight. So now's the time to can all you can, so that you can open a jar in the middle of winter and remind yourself that life is worth living.

This is going to be a project. Block off a whole night for this. You're also going to need some specialized equipment. It's not hard to find, but you will have to find it, so this is not an impulse project.

You'll need a lot of tomatoes to make this worthwhile. In previous years, I lived near a market that would do a $15-for-25lb box of seconds; 25lbs was about as much as I could handle at one time and that stocked me up for the whole season. I also had a larger canning setup. This year, I'd say I canned about 10-15 lbs of tomatoes and I used up all but one of the jars I have. Get good tomatoes. I don't mean beautiful round red ones, I mean peak of summer field-ripened ones, big fleshy heirloom varieties, the kind you can't find in supermarkets. If you grow them, great! If not, you can actually get them pretty cheap because - and this is key - you can get the ugly, split, misshapen ones. You'll be paying close attention to them and chopping them up anyway, so removing any bad spots won't add extra work, and no one cares how ugly a tomato is once it's been cooked down into sauce.

Here's my tomato haul. This is mostly from the garden, supplemented with the yellow ones from a friend's garden and some seconds from the farmers' market. There wasn't a developed seconds market, but I went up to a likely-looking stand, told them I was making sauce, and asked if I could buy a bagful of ugly and dented ones. I went around gathering up the ugliest of the tomatoes, and he gave them to me half off. Thanks, Farmers' Market Guy!

You'll also need a basic canning setup. If you have a pressure cooker, great! I have never used one and am frankly kind of scared of them! I use the boiling water method, which demands, at minimum, a giant pot, mason jars with lids and screw bands, a rack to hold the jars in the pot, and a jar lifter. These aren't too hard to find, even where the hipsters have driven the canning market up. If you can't find mason jars, check the hardware store. If you're lucky, you'll find some overly-ambitious home canner divesting herself of her whole setup on Craigslist! And once you have the equipment, you're set: the only thing you'll need to re-up on are the lids.

I'm following the guidelines from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. I really can't add anything to their excellent, readable "Principles of Home Canning", but they've done a really superior job on making their site navigable and approachable for someone who comes in thinking not "I want to learn all about canning!" but "How do I get these tomatoes in jars?" Their directions are clear and specific, and include links to further information at just those stages in the process where you might start wondering "Wait, why am I doing this?"

I'm making three kinds of tomato product here: whole peeled tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, and tomato sauce. The first two just speak for themselves - well, rather, for the tomatoes they're made from - but the last one I'm really quite proud of.

Tomato Sauce Ingredients

• 10lbs sauce tomatoes, cleaned and roughly chopped
• 1 8 oz can tomato paste
• 2 med onions, finely chopped
• 6-8 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp dried thyme
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• 1 tbsp dried basil
• salt to taste
• large handful fresh basil

Tomato Canning Extravaganza Instructions

Fill your largest pot with water and start sterilizing your jars. You don't actually have to do this, according to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, since your food is going to be processed for more than 10 minutes in boiling water. I do it anyway, to make sure the jars are clean and pre-heated so they won't crack when I add the hot tomatoes and sauce. While you're sterilizing the jars (10 minutes in boiling water), make your sauce.

Pour a generous amount of olive oil into the bottom of a large heavy pot. Crush the garlic into it and saute on medium-high heat until golden. Add the onions and saute until soft. Add the tomato paste - you don't actually need this, but I find that unless you are prepared to simmer your sauce literally overnight, you'll want the sauce to be a little thicker than simple fresh tomatoes will provide. Stir that around, and then start adding your fresh tomatoes.

You'll have so many fresh tomatoes it's basically pointless to have them all chopped beforehand. Just keep chopping them and throwing them in. A note here about your seconds: obviously you're cutting off the scars and the cores, but also make sure you don't use any part of the flesh that's softer than its surrounding bits. 

Go ahead and add the dried spices. If you've got some wine, you can add a splash of that too. Once you've added all the tomatoes, turn the heat down and let the sauce simmer indefinitely. Throw in the fresh basil at the end.

Finished sterilizing your jars? Great! Time to acidify them. Botulinum toxin needs a low-acid environment to grow, and although tomatoes are an acid food, some kinds may have pH values above 4.6, so lemon juice should be added to the jars regardless. Sounds complicated, is in fact as simple as adding one tbsp of lemon juice to each pint jar. Well, that was anticlimactic.

Let the sauce simmer while you prepare your whole peeled tomatoes. This is how I dealt with the abundance of cherry tomatoes; use your structurally sound tomatoes for this. Put them in a basket or strainer and dip them into boiling water (hey, you have a pot of boiling water right there on the stove!) for 30-60 seconds, then rush them over to the sink and run cold water on them. Pop them out of their skins - they should have already split from and into the jars. Fill the jars to half an inch from the top - "headspace".  Once you've peeled all the tomatoes you want to, boil some water - not the water you were soaking the skins in - and pour in the jars to just cover the peeled tomatoes. Tap the sides or stir the contents with a knife to get the air bubbles out.

Clean the jar rims with a damp paper towel; you don't want any tomato bits interfering with the seal. Put the lids on the jars and screw them on with the rings. You don't need any kind of extreme tightening, just firm. The seal is going to happen between the jar and the lid; the ring just keeps everything in place while that happens.

Load your jars into the boiling water bath. This is where a jar lifter is absolutely essential. (If you have a rack that can be lifted out and loaded, that's different.) Normally I disapprove of kitchen gadgets that have only one function, but when that one function is "safely transferring slippery glass things into and out of boiling water", then sign me up.

Make sure your boiling water setup is correct - water over the tops of the jars - and then boil for the time directed. In this case, 40 minutes. While that's bubbling away, make your crushed tomatoes. This is so simple it's a bit ridiculous, and it's what I did with the nicest sauce tomatoes. Simply cut them into quarters (or eighths, depending on how big they are), drop them in a pot, and heat them up while pressing them down slightly. Cook them 5-10 minutes. They'll give off enough liquid to pack them in.

Load up your crushed tomato jars and your sauce jars. This would be where a wide-mouthed funnel would help, if you had one. If not, just use a ladle and be precise. As before, wipe the rims of the jars before placing the lids on them.

Time's up? Take the peeled tomatoes out of the boiling water bath (JAR LIFTERS JAR LIFTERS JAR LIFTERS) and put them on a wire rack to cool. You'll hear them go plunk-plunk-plunk as they cool and the lids invert, creating the seal. Put the sauce jars in the boiling water bath. Check the water level, and go watch an episode of something while they boil for the recommended amount of time. 

Whoa. Look at that. Have a drink.