Hello! Welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook! I’m glad you’ve joined me here on my little corner of the internet!
Today, we’re going to continue our discussion of canning tomatoes. A few days ago, my friend Em invited me over to can tomatoes with her. She has a lovely little urban backyard farm, where she has about 50 tomato plants, fruit trees and chickens. We were planning to put up about 7 quarts of tomatoes, so we started by harvesting about 20 pounds of tomatoes:
While we were harvesting the tomatoes, Em put the canning jars into boiling water and let them simmer. She filled each of the jars with water in order to calculate appropriate water bath level for the eventual canning process:
Next, we blanched the tomatoes in batches in order to peel the skins off them: 15-20 seconds for the San Marzano tomatoes, and 20-30 seconds for the globe tomatoes. Once blanched, the skins just peel right off the flesh of the tomatoes:
We left the San Marzano tomatoes whole after peeling and cut the larger tomatoes into halves or quarters depending on the size of the tomato.
Next, we pulled the jars out of the boiling water. When they were just cool enough to handle, we filled the jars almost to the top with the peeled tomatoes.
Next, we added 1 tablespoon of commercial, bottled lemon juice (NOT fresh squeezed) and about 1 teaspoon of course salt:
Em then dipped water from the boiling pot out and filled the jars almost to the top with water.
Next–and this is important in order to get a good seal on the jars–we wiped the rim of the jars clean:
Next, place the lids on the jars and tighten them to finger-tight:
Place jars back in the water bath–they should be covered with water at this point–add some if you need to. Bring the water back to a boil and boil for 45 minutes.
Take jars out of the water bath and let them cool for 24 hours. You should see a suction seal form during this time–all of ours had a suction seal within an hour or two of canning. **If a suction seal does not form, then the jars are not sealed for storage and you should use those tomatoes right away in order to avoid any complications due to bacteria growth.**
And viola! your tomatoes are canned and ready to store away for those culinary bummer months during the winter when you can’t get fresh tomatoes.
I hope you enjoyed sharing this fun day of canning with me! Tune in later this week when I’ll be posting “a salute to late summer produce.” Should be a fun week!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
