I didn't have many excess tomatoes this year, so I froze them. I've just used a bag of them and I find that they more or less melt into whatever I put them into, i.e. they don't cook down into a sauce but dissolve into a sauce. I presume the cellular structure is destroyed by freezing.
Does anyone know of the vagaries of other preserving methods?
My mom always canned them.
Worked well for us!
Billy wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@c-61-68-245-199.per.connect.net.au:
You *might* do ok if you froze them fast, like with dry ice. Tomatoes are, depending on variety, around 50%-ish water. (This is a quick estimate.) If you freeze something slow, you'll get large sharp ice crystals that perforate cell walls and make them in to mush. If you freeze it fast, you'll get smaller crystals and they won't do as much damage. (Most this information from Good Eats' Strawberry show.)
My mother cooks them down on the stove, then puts the tomatoes in jars and cans them in a hot water bath. Add some browned grown beef, garlic, basil, and orgegano to a qt jar of sauce and you've got spaghetti sauce. It's good stuff. :-)
Puckdropper
I cook them into a sauce base, i.e. just tomatoes, garlic and herbs, and then freeze them in plastic containers, in a good year I make about 5 gallons of sauce, this year it was less. Then over the course of the year I unfreeze some of the sauce, add meat, shrimp, mushrooms, more garlic, and more herbs to turn it into a proper spaghetti sauce which I then refreeze. Adding the other ingredients doubles the volume which is why I do that piecemeal rather than all at once. Frozen sauce keeps forever.
Yep, Yep! I either can or freeze....but before I freeze, if's it for spaghetti sauce, then I cook it down with all the fixings for the sauce, cool & pour into containers, then stick them in the freezer. The portion that I want to use for stewed maters, then I just stew them down, then do the same protocol for freezing.
My grandmother just blanches hers before freezing...I haven't tried that myself yet though!
Never had any problems with my frozen maters...
How did you fix yours before freezing? Sorry they didn't turn out well for you! ~Rae
Oh, they turned out fine, as far as I'm concerned. It's just with fresh tomatoes, it seems like it takes so long to cook them down into a sauce. Probably because the ice ruptured the cell walls, these tomatoes turned into a liquid as they defrosted, no chunks. It just surprised me.
I had been all geared up to do some canning but my crop was so piddlin' that I just cut them up and threw them into the freezer. Maybe I'll get to can next year.
Hope your holding up through the drought your experiencing.
It looks to me that freezing them first helps to produce the sauce because once defrosted, it's just a matter of reducing the liquid. No blender is needed to remove the chunks. Freezing whole tomatoes does take more space. So the reasonable thing, so it seem to me, would be to freeze the tomatoes and the defrost and make your sauce and then re-freeze the sauce.
Maybe I'll be lucky and just eat my tomatoes fresh.
We have always had great results in freezing tomatoes, when skins crack after putting in boiling water we skin tomatoes and use plastic containers for freezing..use as needed and always good for us...stewed tomatoes, sphagetti sauce, etc
Guess everyone's recipes differ ... I don't bottle, freeze, puree, tomatoes, we just eat them or cook them up in a sauce. With my Peppadews, however, I just toss them straight into the freezer. Works perfectly. Frozen seed does not germinate and is less pungent than fresh seed.
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