First batch into the pressure cooker.
I’m going to be seeing red all day long.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
First batch into the pressure cooker.
I’m going to be seeing red all day long.
Surely there are zucchini just outside the camera field…
Wot? You’re not flaying the redskins?
I has jealousy. Our tomatoes this year consisted of twelve (count them, 12) tomatoes. I guess I’ll be going to the farmer’s market for a couple of pecks to can for the winter. I do sauce and chunks.
Those are nice tomatoes!
How is it you get tomatoes that ripe in Minnesota and ours here in Oregon are still green? Are you cheating? Are you using ethylene? You’re jacking your matos aren’t you?
PZed, do you skin the tomatoes before canning?
Mmmm, homegrown! My mum makes a mean greek salad, and my dad makes a darn good salsa.
May I lobby for the inclusion of one or two habaneros before the cookdown? It’s not like I’m pushing the arachnophilic agenda for scorpion peppers or the dualistic ghost peppers in the machine. I would not agree with Blue Oyster Cult’s “don’t fear the Carolina reaper”. Just a habanero to make you feel alive.
Oh ok, add much less spicy peppers than habanero but some capsaicin kick. Might warm you up in a Minnesotan winter.
Before, I’ve cooked them and then filtered out skins and seeds. Nowadays, I just dump the slurry into a food processor and churn it all into a creamy consistency, then simmer it all for a few hours to cook it down and thicken it.
Most excellent, PZ.
I well remember the richness of the soil in your locale, and it is good to see you use it so well.
Man, I’m also starting to overflow with tomatoes here in Manitoba, so I have started my annual tomato sauce project. I just processed my first 10 lbs of the season. First I prepared them by washing, removing the stem part (and any blemishes where insects or slugs have desecrated my fruit), slicing them in half, tossing them in a bowl with 1/2 cup EVOO and a couple teaspoons of salt before transferring them (and all associated liquid – juicy tomatoes leak a lot) to shallow-sided metal pans, on which I roast them, skin-side up. I roast long and low, 300 °F convection for a good 3 hours. Afterwards, I let them cool completely and then scrape everything (including the now extremely concentrated juices) into a container and refrigerating it. Roasting adds this incredible depth to the flavour, and concentrates it down – in this batch, the tomatoes lost 56% of their mass in the process from water evaporation. I’ll do another batch exactly like this probably on Thursday. Then on the weekend, I’ll run both batches through a useful tool which I actually got in the US, a Norpro Sauce Master – this is a hand-cranked machine that uses a large corkscrew to force the tomato juice and pulp (but not the skins and seeds) through a mesh sieve. The waste skins and seeds still have some pulp and juice in them, so I’ll put them through a couple more times to extract as much of the good stuff as possible. The juice and pulp then get whisked together to create my final sauce, which gets Ziploc bagged in 2 and 3 cup allocations, and frozen flat, before getting stored in a box in my chest freezer.
The sauce is incredibly versatile – in my household, it mainly gets used as a base for all sorts of red sauces (for various pasta dishes, as well as chicken parm, pizza, and innumerable other things), and tomato-based Indian curries (e.g. butter chicken). Not only is the umami off-the-charts (because roasted tomatoes contain highly-concentrated glutamic acid), but it is usually quite sweet (especially at the beginning of the harvest, when everything is vine-ripened) – that old nona’s trick of adding a bit of sugar to tomato sauce is completely unnecessary in my case, as the natural sweetness is enough.
Of course, because I make about 20 bags of it in an average year* (maybe 45 or 50 cups), but only use ~15 bags, it tends to accumulate in my freezer (I finished up 2019’s sauce this past year, and got about halfway through 2020…haven’t touched 2021 yet). It’s nice to have though, and is the best way I’ve found to process all of those wonderful summer tomatoes for year-long use.
*75 lbs of tomatoes is about average; this year looks a bit above average.
Its still gazpacho(-weather) season here in S.France, albeit the fresh / over-ripe tomatoes in the outdoors markets are diminishing… the stallholder with a tomato fetish didn’t have many last market. And MUSHROOMS! season is coming up… haven’t seen any in the markets yet. So the interim potage is potato-and-leek (e.g., vichyssoise) — I’ve got some I made a few days ago still chilling out in the fridge (there’s other stuff in the fridge which won’t last long so I’ve been enjoying that first; e.g., for lunch today I had fresh espadon) — to which I’ve added some fresh citron squeezings (I recently made an experimental potato-and-lemon soup which was really Really good, so I’m currently on a bit of try-some-(fresh-)lemon-juice-in-it kick).