On Thursday, I harvested the first 5,5 kg tomatoes from the greenhouse.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
About 4 kg were ripe enough to be used straightaway and the rest we left in a bowl to ripen for now. And those already ripe had to be processed of course, so we made them into canned sauce.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
First I cut them all into eighths. This is a task where a big and scary sharp knife comes in handy because it is possible to cut multiple tomatoes with one cut. A small knife allows only work on single fruits and even a slightly dull one will do more squishing than cutting.
After cutting tomatoes, I also cut three big onions into quarter-crescents, two red bell peppers, and one small pattypan (optional) into small cubes (5-10 mm). I divided everything into halves because it was clear it wouldn’t fit into the pot all in one go.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
We have thrown the onions into hot oil to soften them. While they were bubbling we added spices – whole black pepper, allspice, and bay leaves (also homegrown, I have three Laurus nobilis plants) and let it all simmer together for a bit. BTW, that brown spot on the pot is a mystery – even when we wash it spotless with steel wool, which we do, it appears in the same spot once the pot is heated.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
When the onions were sufficiently glazy but not too soft, the tomatoes, peppers, and pattypan went into the pot too with a generous amount of salt and a bit of sugar. We let it simmer under a lid for twenty minutes and added one bouillon cube (also optional, soy sauce works well too) per 1 kg of tomatoes. These are ketchup tomatoes so they are not very juicy. This is a good thing because they make good thick sauce without the need to boil off too much water. They do contain just enough water to dissolve into a nice sauce.
Once the sauce was done, we put it into pre-heated jam jars with twist-off lids. My mother pre-heats the jars with steam because it sterilizes them better than just washing and it reduces the risk of the glass breaking due to thermal shock too.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Once the lids created a vacuum seal, my mother labeled the jars and I took them into the cellar. These are circa 880 ml jars so this is about 7 l of tomato sauce prefabricate. In the cellar, it will keep for years (I think our record was five years). Essentially it only spoils if the lid is damaged and rusts through.
When preparing for eating, my mother adds cream and flour to thicken it into proper tomato sauce. One jar is enough for about 6-8 servings. It is great with pasta. It is one of my favourite foods so I do hope to harvest more tomatoes. In the greenhouse, it looks promising. Outside the greenhouse, it is a bust and I will run the tomatoes over with the lawnmower so they decompose quicker.
I happened to read this post just while eating ersatz pizza made with the mushy tomatoes from my balcony.
(really just microwaved sandwiches topped with a little canned tuna, fresh tomato, some oil, oregano and cheese)
There is something deeply satisfying about rows of jars full of your own home grown food, plus you get to eat it.
I hope to get a glut of tomatoes in about a month, assuming they remain free of late-blight.
If your tomato plants outside died from a disease, you might want to pull them and remove them from the garden completely.
Awesome!
@lumipuna, I am sure that ersatz pizza tasted good. Everybody should grow some vegetables, even only a few plants on a windowsill or balcony.
@Tethys, I probably won’t bother with that. Phytophthora infestans does not survive long above ground and anyway, there is a big untreated field of potatoes upwind of my garden so the air will be full of spores no matter what I do. If the weather were arid, I would pull them up, dry them, and burn them, but that is not possible with the weather we have now. I doused them with fungicide because I was no longer concerned about their credibility. I do not want to put them into the biowaste container because that might contaminate the composting facility. I won’t bother planting tomatoes outdoors ever again, however, we do not have the right climate for that.
@chigau, it is awesome, thank you :).
It’s about that time of year again, when I start to turn the ~25 kg (occasionally more) of tomatoes from my garden into ~10 kg of sauce. I don’t add anything except a bit of olive oil and salt, because I use the sauce in all kinds of recipes, and they all require different spices and herbs. I also oven-roast, using halved tomatoes, skin-side up, charring the skins and removing at least half of the water (skins are then removed along with seeds using one of those corkscrew devices that push juice and flesh through a sieve while keeping things that won’t fit through the tiny holes separate). The roasting process also Maillard-ifies some of the sugars (as roasting after enough dehydration can lead to temperatures in excess of 100°C in some of the tissue), and concentrates a lot of tomato flavour. Obviously, roasting (cooking in any manner really) will result in the loss of other flavours -- the most volatile ones anyway -- but I do love the deep umami of roasted tomato sauce, and the final product is extremely versatile. Just this weekend, I made homemade pizza using as a base a sauce I made 2 years ago….3 weeks ago I did stuffed manicotti noodles, a couple weeks before that it was cabbage rolls. The sauce freezes extremely well -- I just put 500-750 g allotments into freezer bags, and keep them in a massive chest freezer until I need them. This past spring, I finished my 2021 sauce, and am working my way through 2022 now.
I can also tell exactly when in the harvest season a sauce was made -- the ones dated from August to around the 3rd week of September are quite a bit sweeter, because the tomatoes were exclusively vine-ripened. Sauces made in October are less sweet (still good -- sometimes you don’t want a super-sweet sauce because it can overwhelm other qualities), as I use a mix of partially vine-ripened tomatoes and green tomatoes which were picked prematurely in the last week of September and box-ripened. Frost is a major consideration here, and while the first frost is pushing later in the year (thanks climate change!), every year is different, and besides, the plants are pretty much toast by that point anyway.
@VolcanoMan, this is an almost “ready-to-eat” sauce. If the tomatoes continue to grow and ripen, I want to fill a few bottles with a home-made ketchup. And if I have some tomatoes after that still, I will probably make what you describe, which we call “tomato paste”.
Right now the tomato harvest is still ongoing (about 8 kg so far) but we are up to our ears in marrow and pattypan pumpkins. I have given out for free well over 20 kg of pumpkin, we processed and canned about 20 kg and there is still plenty in the garden (I counted 13 approximately 2 kg pumpkins today hidden in the growth). After a bad start, the pumpkin plants went completely nuts.
Well, since my sister got clear instructions not to let the tomatoes run wild while we’re on holiday, I’m actually getting ripe tomatoes this year, but apparently only the cherry tomatoes succeeded so they’re only for snacking. In other words, I’m back from my holiday.