Overwhelmed By Tomatoes? Get Crackin' Now!

Time for my annual exhortation to can your own vegetables.

I'm abnormal when it comes to modern American life; I cannot identify most TV shows or celebrities, but I can tell you more than you'd want to know about what a friend calls "fierce hobbies," such a model making, reloading my own ammunition, or, yep, canning. All of them require a lot of attention to detail and tend to focus the mind and body completely.

Yet of them all, canning is perhaps the most gentle and productive. A few generations back, many folks, urban or rural, did it every summer. And to be honest, the longest part of making good tomato sauce for canning is slow-cooking it. The canning can be done in two hours. So please do not tell me you lack time to can your own sauce. There are few more rewarding things in one's kitchen, in the dead of winter, than opening a jar and evoking summer again.

As to how to do it? I've long favored a U Georgia site for the scientific principles espoused in the recipes.   Now that tomatoes are cheap, why not save some money and put up a few gallons?

Some advice if  you are ready to get cracking with this wonderful way to save the harvest. Modern tomatoes lack the acidity of older varieties, and even when I can heirlooms, I add a teaspoon of lemon juice to every pint jar.  I also tend to pressure-can tomatoes these days; granny never did, but the science of food preservation has come a long way. Cherish her recipes but use modern techniques in the canning kitchen. I employ both my first canner, a Presto, and my heavy duty All American Canner for summer chores. Great advice on canning marinara sauce, as well as a decent recipe, can be found here.

I have little time for folks who tell me "I don't have time to do [insert DIY activity]."  If one were to count the hours and hours wasted on the "smart" phone or watching videos of people injuring themselves, there would be enough time to restore a Model T or build a lake cottage.

Get Cracking. Summer is swiftly passing us by and the boxes of canning tomatoes will soon be gone from the farmer's market.  If  you grow your own, I find that a bushel of tomatoes yields about 3 gallons of finished sauce, depending on the variety of tomato and how much you cook it down.