Opening a jar of home canned tomatoes in February is just like opening a jar of summer.
I like to can plain tomato sauce with just a bit of lemon juice and salt. It is a delicious jumping off point for any meal later on. We can about 80 jars to get us through till next year.
Some helpful tips :
🍅I don’t bother seeding or skinning the tomatoes. It doesn’t affect the taste and it adds nutrition. And it’s easier. And I don’t have an Italian grandmother who will yell at me.
🍅Crush some tomatoes at the bottom of the pot and bring to a boil over med heat first before adding in more quartered tomatoes. It makes for a more homogenous sauce.
🍅I do add an acid. Tomatoes are not as acid as you think and now are bred to be less acidic to suit palettes. I waterbath can tomato sauce so I add lemon juice or citric acid into each jar (a 1Tbsp of lemon juice for a pint or a 1/4 tsp of citric acid ).
🍅if I don’t have time to deal with a glut of tomatoes, or conversely the harvest is trickling in, I will destem them and throw them into a plastic bag in the freezer to deal with later. The beauty of this is the skins will slip right off when they thaw out.
🍅some tomatoes are made for sauce -sans marzano, Amish paste, Roma but I’m not fussy. They just may take a bit longer to simmer down. When you live in an area where tomatoes don’t grow easily because of blight or leaf mold, you take what you can get.
🍅use a thick bottomed pot for simmering your sauce. And don’t cover it. You want the extra water to evaporate, not stay in the sauce.
Happy Canning !
Love Jenn xx