I am really late getting my garden in this year and finally have the ground prepared. Whatever tomatoes I planted last year just didn't do well for canning purposes. I'm not starting from seeds and get my plants at Lowe's or Home Depot. Any suggestion on a good variety to can (that I would find at either of those two stores)? My garden is
*very* small so I can't put in too many plants. Sue in the San Joaquin Valley of Calif.
If your canning for sauce Roma's are the best and the grow in a fairly compact plant.
Sorry. I should have been more specific. No, I grow for stewed tomatoes - tomatoes with onion, celery and bell peppers. Sue
Then any tomato that is usually called slicing tomato. They are lighter in color and tend to be bigger than a Roma.
Any tomato will work then. Maybe plant a couple Better Boy and one something-else (Roma?) Better Boy is a hybrid all-purpose tomato. It has good flavor and usually yields very high.
Bob
Find a local green house nursery instead of the big box warehouse places. Nurseries will have healthier and a greater selection of plants.
Tomatoes for canning are divided into two categories, "Plum" and "Globe". Plums tomatoes are great for sauces they have a higher pulp to juice ratio. Plums also have Plum shape to them, tends to be long and tapered at the ends. Globes are more rounded and good for general canning and for soups. Romas "plum" tomatoes are good for sauces and Big Boys "globe" tomatoes are good for Juices and Soups.
Get a Roma food strainer for canning tomatoes.
I could not let myself pass that one up. If you are canning with peppers and and onions I hope you are using a pressure canner. Using a water bath canning with peppers can be very very bad news. For the note a pressure canner is not the same as a pressure cooker. Something like in the link.
This is an unconventional answer because it's a cherry tomato, but the Sun Gold makes incredible sauce. The Sun Gold is terrific eating tomato, the sweetest of any tomato that I've eaten. It's also an extremely prolific plant, they start producing early and they continue to produce for months so you'll have more tomatoes that you'll know what to do with. I made about 5 gallons of sauce from them last year which I'm still eating. I freeze my sauce, I don't can so I'm not sure how well it will work for that, but for frozen sauce they're great.
As an aside, don't buy your plants from a big box store, buy them from a local nursery. The big box stores don't carry interesting varieties, a good nursery will have many more choices including heirlooms, and the plants will be better adapted to local conditions. The plants will also be healthier, the big box stores wiped out the entire New England tomato crop a couple of years ago by selling plants that were infected with late blight.
I've always used water bath with the peppers and onions. So far, so good. I've used recipes that allow water bath with these veggies. I'm terrified of pressure canning. Sue
Chuckle. We have no local green house. The closest possible would be
35 miles from here. Since I have no pressing need to go out of town in the next few days (my only reason is for doctor's appts) the cost would be pretty awful considering the price of gas right now.One problem I had last year was that I didn't have enough tomatoes at any given time to can. I'm thinking maybe my error was in getting two different varieties (2 plants each). I don't know. They just weren't successful. Sue
I was pretty sure I'd get some objections when I posted about Lowe's or Home Depot. At least I didn't say Wal*Mart. We have no local nursery. Used to many years ago. The closest possible is 35 miles away. Gas prices being what they are.... Apparently we haven't had the blight problem here as this is a major commercial tomato growing area and if we'd had it there would have been a huge hew and cry. A few years ago I made an attempt at canning catsup. That was just too much work for one measly pint. I'm guessing that making tomato sauce would be the same. I tried making spaghetti sauce once, but it came out bitter. Tried twice and didn't like the results either time. I thought I'd burned it the first time since my stove doesn't turn down as low as it should so the second time I stirred it for the entire 20 or 30 minutes. Waaay too much work and still awful. I've always grown some Sweet 100s that were just delicious eating tomatoes. Almost like candy. Sue
You must be living in the city. I live in the country were their are lots of green houses and nurseries. I love the nurseries where thousands of plants of many kinds surround you. The colors and the numerous sweet earthy smells... Better than going to a movie.
I will subdivide tomatoes once again. Their are two kinds of tomatoes plants, "Determinate" and "InDeterminate". Determinate tomatoes ripen on the vine all at once which are great for canning. Determinate tomatoes have a single stalk that grows upwards, Romas and Beefsteaks are determinate. Indeterminate tomato plants provide fruits throughout the season, never enough for canning. Indeterminate tomato plants are bush like with no main stalk. Examples of indeterminate tomato plants are "Early Girl" and "Cherry". You will not get enough to even think about canning.
Indeterminate tomatoes use those ring like tomato supports. Determinate tomatoes plants tend to use ladder supports. I would think for canning small amounts, six plants at least would be a minimum. Around Three pounds of tomatoes for each quart of whole canned tomatoes. I will be growing close to forty tomato plants for canning this fall for me myself and I.
I am terrified of botulism. New pressure canners have safety features. Count yourself lucky so far. The link is just one of many. For veggies I prefer pickling or freezing otherwise the pressure canner is the only way to go. I use the pressure canner for all veggies including tomato products. Tomatoes can go either way Water Bath or Pressure. The only time I use the water bath is for Fruit jellies.
Once you learn how to use your pressure canner. One can make different kinds of soups and I can the extra with my small four quart pressure canner. Great for stocks also. One can get good at it, by the time I eat dinner and clean up, the extra is canned good for the year.
For sauces, the skins and seeds need to be removed with a food strainer. Seeds and skins can cause the sauce to become bitter. Also hot house tomatoes tend to be bitter anyways. Commercial tomato venders cannot provide a good vine ripen tomato, no way, just not possible. Fresh vine ripe is always sweeter almost candy like.
Minutes to make sauce for canning... Try hours.... :)
Either you are on the other side of the planet or cat like me and up half the night. Three in the morning here watching the lighting in the distance dark sky.
-snip-
With 4 plants, I'd be concentrating on good eating tomatoes. Buy the canning tomatoes from a local farm by the bushel. Enjoy the fresh ones while you are able.
I plant a dozen plants and don't plan on canning any. [if I have a good crop I'll do some chili sauce]
Jim
Romas usually make good sauces and are meatier than slicers. I like Viva Italia but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be found in most stores as either seed or plant. I mail order seeds for almost all of my tomatoes.
Well, take those objections with a grain of salt. All of that rhapsodic prose about local nurseries simply "ain't necessarily so". Many of them sell plants that come in on the back of a truck just like the "big box" boys; they just don't tell you. There is nothing magical about unusual, oddball varieties or heirlooms. I say experiment until you find a variety that suits your palate and your garden and stick with it. You might try to find out what other folks in your area grow and use that as a starting point. Grow what you eat the most of (because, at the end of the year, that's what you will have spent the most money on) and save the cash for the relatively expensive treats, says I; anything else is false economy. You must really have specific tastes, if you're willing to can your own stewed tomatoes. Or, maybe, you're having a domesticity attack ;-)! It happens, sometimes, LOL. I can offer no specific suggestions because, to my taste, there isn't a dime's worth of difference among them, although, I'm certain some tomato varieties are better suited to specific uses than are others. My garden grows determinate (Celebrity) because they're reliable and early AWA indeterminate (Big Boy) because they're reliable and everbearing (at least until Jul-Aug) and easily rejuvenate for a second crop in the fall. This morning, they all (four of each) are loaded with fruit, much of it frying sized. I only grow a few tomatoes and most of those don't make it to ripeness because we eat more of them green. I'm not much of a fruit eater and ripe tomatoes are "okay" as long as they're not sweet. Ripe tomatoes are "for" hamburgers; end of story. LOL We always let a few ripen, though, because DW likes the occasional fresh tomato with meals and I eat them, if they're there. As you know from your own experiece, BWB is perfectly fine for acidic foods like (most) tomatoes and the percentage of peppers present is not likely to be a problem. If you're unsure, add a bit of ascorbic and/or citric acid to the finished product; that's what commercial canners do and it is undetectable. Citric acid also helps retain color. See the "****" footnote on the citation further down. USDA used to have a web site that addressed food safety at home, including home canning. Probably still does; I didn't look. The Ball "blue book" remains the standard reference. Warning: Many of the suzy home-maker variety private web sites are dessiminating inaccurate or misleading information that may prove hazardous to your health or, at the very least, will produce an unsatisfactory product! Some years back, unbeknownst to me, my wife ordered the blue book directly from Ball. Within a couple of days, I bought a copy at a discount chain bookstore, Booksamillion or some such. When the book arrived from Ball, we discovered the off-the-rack copy was a later edition. Life is funny that way sometimes.... You may find the information here to be redundant but I hope some of it is helpful:
I make a years supply of sauce at the end of August or in early September which is the end of my growing season. I violate the rule about pealing the tomatoes, I found that it's unnecessary if you use enough garlic, so my procedure is fairly simple. I use a blender to puree the tomatoes along with the garlic and herbs, I use a handful of garlic in each blender batch along with some fresh rosemary, basal and oregano. I fill a 20 quart pot with the puree, add salt and some cut up tomatoes, and cook it on medium heat until been reduced by about a third. I then freeze it. At a later date I'll unfreeze a few quarts and add sauteed hamburger, onion and garlic. I also add sauteed shrimp, garlic, shallots and white wine. I do the meat and shrimp as separate batches because the meat needs to be drained in a colander to get the fat out, but the shrimp and white wine is added to the sauce without draining because you want the wine in the sauce. I use olive oil to saute the onions and garlic. I freeze the finished sauce in smaller containers, and the unfreeze it as needed. The sauce gets better then longer it's in the freezer and it will keep for years. Last year I used Sun Golds and Sweet 100s along with some Cosmonaut Volkovs and it made the best sauce that I've ever made (I've been doing this for 30 years). Making the sauce base takes about 30-45 minutes of work, and a couple of hours on the stove to reduce the sauce. Upgrading it to the full sauce takes about the same amount of work, but for each batch you do you get a dozen meals or so.
Make that "all at once-ish". It's more like a bell curve with a few ripening, leading to a lot ripening, and goes back to a few ripening, and ends with winter.
Ouch...that hurts! My math teacher always did hit me with that ruler for not adding my error rates.
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