Two weeks ago I organized a bulk buy of Early Girl and Roma no spray tomatoes from a local farmer in Oregon City. I also got some additional Roma tomatoes, including an heirloom variety called Black Plum, from another organic local farm on Sauvie Island. All in all, I think I must have bought over 3 TONS of tomatoes for 45 or so families.

I canned about 6 or 7 lugs (120-140 lbs) of tomatoes so far, which yielded 6 qts frozen and 36 qts canned tomato sauce. I am hoping we won’t need to buy any commercial sauce at all this winter.

My method is probably cheating, but it works for me.

1. First, I wash all the tomatoes. I just dump a case at a time into the sink, like this. (These are the Black Plum heirloom Romas. I used them last year too, and they are great!)

2. Then I, or in this case my little helper, simply purees the whole tomatoes (skin, seeds and all) in batches.

3. Dump the puree into a big wide pot, bring to a boil, and then simmer down to about half the original volume (appx 3 hrs).

4. Hot water bath process or freeze. Last year, I froze the resulting sauce, but this year I canned most of the sauce. I added 2 T lemon juice to every quart of sauce and hot water bath processed the cans for 40 mins. Easy!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 7:45 pm and is filed under canning, pickling, preserving, local farms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.