So, your garden produce is rolling in and covering your kitchen counters! It’s an exciting time, but also overwhelming. Maybe you want to dip your toes into trying canning or another kind of preserving? Maybe you want to save some of this bounty for winter but you definitely don’t have time right now.
I’ve been canning and preserving for years (pretty much as long as I’ve been gardening). It’s a fun thing to do and I love it, but I really don’t love canning during the hottest part of the summer. Some things, like green beans or corn, I really don’t have much choice about the timing. When it’s ready, it needs canned.
But tomatoes on the other hand - I can totally buy myself some time to deal with them!
If you’ve ever canned tomatoes or made tomato sauce, you know how much water they hold! There are specific paste varieties that help to minimize this (Roma and Amish Paste are a few varieties that do well in WV). However, it still takes hours and hours to cook them down into something resembling sauce.
Freezing helps to eliminate some of this work, right off the bat! It also allows you to temporarily preserve them until your plants are done producing, then you can have one big day of sauce making, instead of having to deal with it over and over again throughout the summer.
So, without further ado, here is how I handle my tomato harvest!
Invest in some gallon bags (or a gallon ice cream container, really anything that holds some volume will work). I simply wash, cut out the stem and throw in a freezer bag! For small tomatoes, I leave them whole and for larger ones I halve or quarter since that allows more to fit in the bag.
Toss in the freezer and forget about until you have a moment to deal with them (or start running out of room). This year, I started running out of freezer space pretty quickly. Having used this method in years past, I realized how much volume was reduced when they thawed out. So, after freezing, I’ve been partially thawing back out and letting them drain in a colander until a lot of the water has dripped out.
Seeds and skins are also really easy to remove at this point, if that’s something you want to do. Personally, I don’t worry too much about seeds or skins in the sauce, but I know some people want to remove them.
I then put them back into a freezer bag and then back into the freezer. I’ll follow this system until the end of the growing season, when all of my tomatoes have been harvested. One day this fall I’ll gather up all of the bags, thaw them all out and begin making sauce. Getting rid of this much water will be a game changer for sauce making day!
See!!! Same bag of tomatoes after thawing out and refreezing! Over half of the volume was reduced, allowing me to fit so many more tomatoes into my limited freezer space!
This trick has saved my sanity for many summers and I hope it helps take some stress off of you, as well!