{"id":267,"date":"2014-11-10T20:46:10","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T03:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eweforia.wordpress.com\/?p=267"},"modified":"2014-11-10T20:46:10","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T03:46:10","slug":"canning-tomatoes-with-a-crock-pots-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/canning-tomatoes-with-a-crock-pots-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Canning Tomatoes with a Crock-Pot’s Help"},"content":{"rendered":"

My springtime “I-need-to-plant-something-green” eyes are inevitably bigger than my August “what-the-heck-was-I-thinking-when-I-planted-all-those-freakin’-tomatoes” tummy. Because I preserve a great deal of the meat and vegetables that I grow, I dutifully can all those tomatoes despite the growing number of unused and unneeded jars of canned tomatoes building on my pantry shelves.<\/p>\n

This summer was no different except that I planted double the number of tomatoes than usual, thinking that I needed to provide my parents with tomatoes since they no longer grow their own. Well, they moved into a retirement home that provides all meals. To make matters worse, I learned in July that I needed to forgo my usual high-acid diet to help an acid reflux problem. So no more tomato dishes for me.<\/p>\n

The tomatoes plants, however, outdid themselves.<\/p>\n

My practice is to wash the freshly picked tomatoes and immediately freeze them in gallon zip-lock bags. Then when the weather cools off and I don’t mind heating up the kitchen with pots of boiling liquid, I preserve the harvest for long-term storage. This post describes two ways that I let my crock-pot do the heavy work for me.<\/p>\n

Tomato Juice<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. Dump a gallon bag of frozen tomatoes into a 3.5-quart (or thereabouts) crock-pot. Feel free to add up to 1 cup of other veggies (think V-8), such as celery or a jalape\u00f1o pepper.<\/li>\n
  2. Cook for 10 to 12 hours.<\/li>\n
  3. Pour the cooked tomatoes into a food mill that you’ve suspended over a large bowl.<\/li>\n
  4. Force as much pulp and liquid as possible through the food mill and into the bowl.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That’s it. You’ll need to shake the juice to mix the pulp and liquid; it naturally separates. Store in the fridge for 10 to 14 days. Makes 1\/2 gallon of juice.<\/p>\n

    Tomato Sauce<\/h2>\n

    The most time-consuming task in making tomato sauce is cooking it down to remove the liquid and thicken the sauce. The crock-pot will do that for you.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Dump a gallon bag of frozen tomatoes into a 3.5-quart (or thereabouts) crock-pot.<\/li>\n
    2. Cook for 10 to 12 hours.<\/li>\n
    3. Pour the cooked tomatoes into a food mill that you’ve suspended over a large bowl. The liquid will go into the bowl; the tomatoes and pulp will remain in the food mill.\"100_1331\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. Dispose of the liquid in the bowl (or save it somewhere to make soup with).<\/li>\n
    5. Force as much pulp as possible through the food mill and into the bowl.<\/li>\n
    6. Make five more batches of pulp. Store the pulp in the fridge until all batches have been processed. If you can borrow one or two additional crock-pots, it will speed things up a lot.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The pulp in the bowl is the perfect consistency to make tomato sauce, pizza sauce, and spaghetti sauce. We’ll add some basic spices to make a general-purpose tomato sauce. When you open the canned sauce, you can add meat or more spices to suit whatever you are making.<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Transfer the pulp to a large cooking pot, preferably a 5-gallon stainless steel one.<\/li>\n
      2. Add the following to the pulp in the bowl:\n
          \n
        • 1 cup chopped onion<\/li>\n
        • 1 cup chopped green pepper<\/li>\n
        • 1\/4 cup brown sugar<\/li>\n
        • 2 Tbsp basil<\/li>\n
        • 2 Tbsp oregano<\/li>\n
        • 4 tsp salt<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
        • Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring frequently to prevent scorching.<\/li>\n
        • Ladle hot sauce into hot jars, leaving 1″ of headspace.<\/li>\n
        • Wipe the jar rim clean. Place a hot lid and ring on jar and screw down tightly.
          \nProcess pints for 20 minutes and quarts for 25 minutes at 10 lb pressure in a pressure canner.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          My springtime “I-need-to-plant-something-green” eyes are inevitably bigger than my August “what-the-heck-was-I-thinking-when-I-planted-all-those-freakin’-tomatoes” tummy. Because I preserve a great deal of the meat and vegetables that I grow, I dutifully can all those tomatoes despite the growing number of unused and unneeded jars of canned tomatoes building on my pantry shelves. This summer was no different except […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-to","tag-canned-tomatoes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eweforia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}