The weather has been chilly for the past few days and it seemed like a good time to do something that would help warm up the house a bit. I decided it was time to make a little more room in the freezer by making my frozen tomatoes into sauce. The process is pretty simple, but very time consuming.
To start I put one bag of frozen tomatoes in to my big stock pot with a little bit of water and start thawing them out. Once the first bag has melted enough I add a second and third bag until my stock pot is nearly full with thawing tomatoes.
Once all the tomatoes have melted down I run them through my food mill to remove all the seeds and skins. Those go to the chickens for a special treat. What I am left with is basically tomato juice.
The juice goes back into my stock pot where it continues to cook down until it reaches the thickness that I want. This is the most time consuming part of the process as I have to be sure to keep the heat low and stir it from time to time to prevent scorching the bottom of the pot.
Once it has reached the thickness I want I start to prepare my canner and jars. I add a tablespoon of lemon juice to each pint that I process. I like to keep my sauce as simple as possible so that I can use it for a wide variety of dishes.
This round of sauce making yielded nine pints of sauce from approximately three gallons of raw frozen tomatoes. I could have cooked the sauce down longer to make it a bit thicker, but I think for my purposes this is fine. I did a second round of tomato sauce a few weeks later that resulted in thirteen pints of sauce. That brings this years total for tomato sauce to twenty-two pints of sauce. This was in addition to the forty-eight pints of salsa I canned this summer, the flats of tomatoes that I gave away at work, and all the yummy fresh tomatoes that I could eat. I have to say that this was a very productive year for my tomatoes.
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