Tomato sauce -- done at last

I've finally -- finally! -- finished the tomato sauce.

This was a long journey that began in June when we planted 16 tomato plants.

We harvested a few tomatoes here and there, and as I harvested them I used the food strainer to purée them, then froze the purée.

After ripening all the green tomatoes...

...and puréeing them, the freezer was stuffed with purée.

I didn't want to start cooking down the purée into tomato sauce until two things happened: One, all the green tomatoes had ripened; and two, the cookstove was in constant use (as opposed to letting it go out during the day). As December's temperatures dropped and the cookstove was always hot, I started processing the purée.

I defrosted four bags at a time.

By letting the frozen bags defrost overnight, some of the watery portions leaked out of the bag and into the bowl. Just that much less to cook down.

Then it was time to pour it into a large stock pot.

I nested two pots double-boiler style and parked them on the stove. About three times a day, I topped off the water in the lower pot so it wouldn't boil dry. I didn't use a lid, since I wanted the liquid to cook down.

I stirred the purée a few times a day. After one night of cooking, you can see how far down it reduced.

It took about three days for each pot of purée to reduce to sauce consistency.

And while it made the house smell rich and tomato-y during this process, I had to repeat it three times to use up all the purée in the freezer. Nine days of smelling cooking tomatoes got to be a bit much. You can also understand why I wanted to use the passive heat from the cookstove to make the sauce. Nine days of cooking the sauce on our propane stove would have used a lot of propane.

I re-froze the first batch of tomato sauce, figuring I'd defrost and can all the sauce at once; but that was the wrong thing to do since I had to re-defrost the sauce and heat it thoroughly (tomato sauce should be hot-packed), plus I could only process so many jars at a time. So from then on I just canned each batch of sauce after it cooked down and while it was still hot, and this worked out far better.

Tomatoes can be water-bath canned (unless there are additives like onions or bell peppers). I never flavor my tomato sauce because I like it to be "generic." That way I can take a jar and flavor it however I like, such as Mexican or Italian or whatever.

Because the acid content of tomatoes, even heirloom varieties, is never assured, it's necessary to add an acidifier.

In this case, I added a quarter-teaspoon of citric acid to each pint. (I also added a half-teaspoon of salt to each jar.)

Scalding my Tattler lids.

Into the water bath for 30 minutes (actually, about 35 minutes adjusted for our elevation).

First batch, done.

Second batch, processing

By the time the third and final batch was cooked down and canned up, I was thoroughly sick of tomatoes.

Fortunately that feeling is tempered by the utter satisfaction that comes from concluding a project which was home-grown, from beginning to end, on our farm.

One of the many reasons I love canning.

Making tomato sauce

We butchered four animals last Monday, so I was tasked with cleaning out one of the chest freezers in anticipation of the estimated 1400 lbs. of meat which will be returning (and which, fortunately, we're not all keeping).

One of the items to clean out was the bags of frozen tomato purée I had saved up from the garden's bounty over the summer.

I wanted to turn the tomato purée into tomato sauce. I'd never done this before (mostly because prior to this I'd never had such beautiful purée, thanks to the use of a food strainer), so this was new territory for me.

The basic premise in making tomato sauce is to get rid of a lot of the water which occurs naturally in the purée by cooking it off (some people "bake" it out by baking purée in an oven at low temps). Since we had the wood cookstove going anyway, I simply nested two large pots and set them on the stove. I fit about half the frozen purée into the inside pot.

The idea behind nesting the pots is to make a double boiler. The outer pot is filled with enough water to surround the inner pot, up to the level of the contents. The water boils, which heats the contents of the inner pot but doesn't burn it. I've burned enough stuff in my career to welcome the gentle, consistent heat of a double boiler setup.

The rest of the frozen purée I put in large bowls on the table to defrost.

All night long the purée sat on the cookstove, slowly defrosting and then heating. It stayed thin and runny and I despaired of ever making sauce.

In fact, it stayed on the cookstove for three days (as in, 72 straight hours). Periodically I added water to the outer pot (so it wouldn't boil dry) and wondered if I was wasting my time.

And then something magical happened: it cooked down into the most beautiful smooth tomato sauce you ever saw. Somehow I couldn't believe it, but it was true.

Meanwhile, the frozen bagged purée I had put in bowls to defrost had one beneficial side effect I hadn't anticipated: a lot of the watery portions leaked out of the bags, leaving the more solid portions inside. I simply poured off the watery leakage.

When it came time to take the first batch off the stove and put this second batch on, it cooked down much faster. I'll do this with all of it next time. Live and learn!

By the time I was done, the sauce was magnificent.

At this point I could have flavored the sauce any number of ways, but I didn't for two reasons: One, I wanted the sauce to be suitable as a foundation for any number of dishes, so bland is best; and two, adding additional ingredients (onions, peppers, mushrooms, etc.) would mean I would have to pressure-can it instead of water-bath can it. So I kept it plain.

Time to can. I washed the jars...

...and ladled in the sauce. It came to 21 pints.

See how beautiful it is? Like jars of rubies. I'm always tickled when a new project works.

Before canning the sauce, I added a tablespoon of vinegar to each jar as an acidifier. Modern tomatoes, even "heirloom" or non-hybrid, have a lot less acid than their ancestral forebears. It never hurts to add a bit more acid just to play it safe.

I was too cowardly, however, to do the actual canning on the wood cookstove (another frontier I will have to conquer at some point). I canned it on the propane stove.

Now that I understand how to make sauce from purée, I will probably sauce the vast majority of tomatoes I get in the garden next year. Nothing beats having sauce on hand for any number of pasta dishes, casseroles, soups, etc.

Why acidify tomatoes?

Over at Thoughts from Frank and Fern, there's a very educational post about whether or not it's necessary to acidify tomatoes when canning. Fern emailed and asked my opinion on the subject, which she included in the post. The opinions of some other bloggers are included as well.

Well worth the read, especially if canning tomatoes is looming in your near future.

Picking potatoes and canning tomatoes

A friend with an overflowing garden invited me over to get a box of tomatoes for canning. I love going to her house because this woman has the greenest thumb of anyone I've ever met.

She has a picturesque shed with Virginia creeper growing over it.

While chatting, this friend asked if I wanted some potatoes, as she had far too many for herself. So we went to her potato bed and dug up a box of potatoes.

She had both red potatoes...

...and Yukon gold.

Many of them were huge!

I went home with a big box of potatoes, a pumpkin, and two boxes of tomatoes (one box of ripe tomatoes, and a box of green tomatoes).

Then a week went by before I had a chance to can the tomatoes. By this point some of the ripe ones were going bad...

...and many of the green tomatoes had ripened into red. Time to get these babies canned!

I started by washing some quart jars.

Then I boiled a pot of water and dropped in some tomatoes, to loosen the skins.

After being in the hot water for a few minutes, cool them in cold water.

Then the tomatoes are easy to peel. Here's a bowl of peeled tomatoes. Because they were over-ripe at this stage, they were verrrrrry juicy.

In fact, I like to drain them in a colander to remove some of the juice.

Then into the blender...

...for a quick chopping up.

All too-ripe tomatoes as well as the peels went into the compost pile.

I got five quarts of puréed tomatoes out of this batch.

Into the water-bath for twenty minutes.

Letting the jars cool before taking off the rings...

After the jars cool, the tomato parts separate from the amber liquid. Without draining the peeled tomatoes before canning them, there would be a lot more liquid!