Canning Tomato Sauce

The tomato harvest this year has been slow in coming, but as it has trickled in I have been putting the ripest of them into the freezer, filling multiple gallon bags along the way.  I didn't have enough time to can any of them this summer because I was plenty busy preserving other produce from the garden.  The other reason I have been freezing them, aside from keeping them as fresh as possible, is to make them easier to skin for the sauce.  I have tried boiling them to skin them in the past, but it is so much simpler just to peel the skins off as they thaw.  Much nicer than burning my fingers trying to peel hot tomatoes.


So I began with four gallon bags of whole tomatoes.  I use all of my varieties of tomatoes for sauce including the cherry tomatoes since I have far too many to eat them all fresh and they all add thier own delicious flavor to the sauce.  I washed the frozen tomatoes and then removed any stems and trimmed off any bad spots.  All of the tomatoes went into my biggest pot and then I added a little water to start the cooking process.  As they warmed, I pulled them out one by one and peeled their skins off, then returned them to the pot.  Eventually they started to simmer and I let them cook down for a few hours before moving on to the next step.

After all the tomatoes had become mostly liquid they took a turn going through my food mill.  I didn't want all the seeds in my sauce and this is how I removed as many as I could as well as any skins or tough parts that I may have missed.  The seeds and skins that were left all went to the chickens who happily ate every last crumb.  The sauce was returned to the pot where I let it simmer most of the day to become thicker.  I like a fairly thick sauce, but I didn't want to make paste, so I cooked it down until it was reduced by half and stuck to the spoon a bit as I poured it off.

When the sauce was getting closed to the desired consistancy I started to prepare the jars and canner for the final stage.  I made sure that they were boiled for at least ten minutes before I started to transfer the sauce to the jars.  Each jar got a tablespoon of lemon juice and then was filled with sauce.  I left a half inch of head space in each jar, then wiped the rims and secured the lids and returned them to the boiling water.  I let them boil for forty-five minutes, then rest for five, then the jars went onto the counter to seal and cool for several hours.  After all that work, the four gallons of fresh frozen tomatoes cooked down to only eight pints of sauce.  I added them to the other six pints I made a few weeks ago.  It isn't a ton of sauce but I should have enough for a few tomato based dishes over the winter.