Good canning tomato??

[zxcvbob]

If I get enough peppers and tomatoes at once, I can a batch or two of salsa, but mostly my tomatoes are for eating fresh and giving a few away. Commercial canned tomatoes are so good and so cheap, it hardly pays to can your own -- except occasionally as practice so you know

*how* to can your own if you need to someday. In a pinch I can use canned whole tomatoes (the big #10 cans from Sam's Club) and fresh chiles and onions to make salsa.

Tomatillos actually grow better here (Minnesota) than tomatoes, so I like growing a few of them for green salsa. They usually reseed themselves and I just transplant a few, but I didn't get any volunteer seedlings last year so I bought some fresh tomatillos and planted seeds saved from the biggest one. They are coming along nicely.

Here's my favorite salsa recipe:

Chile Salsa (from USDA bulletin 539) yield: 6 to 8 pints

5 pounds tomatoes 2 pounds chile peppers 1 pound onions, chopped 1 cup vinegar (5%) 3 tsp salt 1/2 tsp pepper

Roast and peel peppers if they have tough skins (not necessary with jalapeños or serranos) remove seeds and stems, chop. Scald and peel tomatoes; chop. Combine all ingredients in large saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer 10 minutes. Ladle into pint jars, leave 1/2 inch headspace. Adjust lids and process in boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

Notes: If the tomatoes are too juicy, add an 8 ounce can of tomato sauce or a tablespoon of tomato paste. I like using half bottled lemon juice and half white vinegar instead of straight vinegar. I don't know why but it tastes better than using all vinegar or all lemon juice.

-Bob

[Sue]

LOL. No city here. I live in a town of 34,000 in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Thousands of acres of commercially grown canning tomatoes grown around here (as well as cotton, almonds, cantaloupes, sugar beats, wheat, dairy cows, sheep. Oh, I could go out into a field and get the tomatoes I suppose but I'd rather grow them myself. No, there is no nursery around here other than an orchid nursery.

Excellent info. I knew about the two types and suspected that's where I may have gone wrong in the last couple of years. I think it was just luck my first 3 years of growing tomatoes. Thanks! Sue

[Sue]

Thanks. Oh, I don't see that my canned stewed tomatoes are any better than what I could buy at the store. It's just the satisfaction of doing it. I was raised by a career woman who made strawberry jam

*once*. That was the total of her canning. Thanks for the recipe! Sue

[Sue]

another post to someone else, I really don't see that my canned tomatoes are any better. It's just the challenge and satisfaction of doing it. I was not raised by a stay-at-home-mom (rare for the 50's) so this canning business is new to me. I grow green beans, too, but I freeze those. Except for last year when I went on vacation leaving instructions to my adult daughter to water the garden. She managed to water the tomatoes and bell peppers (I had excellent ones last year) but completely ignored the bean which were in an adjacent plot. Hmph. I tried corn one year but it was completely overwhelmed by ants. yuck. Also, it fell over and I had to stake it up. All I can think is that I over watered it. I never tried again. I appreciate your dash of humor. Sue

[Doug Freyburger]

I sympathize with running a hobby to completion once and then losing interest. I've done that with most of the crafts that I have tried. I demonstrated to myself I could do X. Done. Next project type.

Only a few hobbies I've continued. Herb gardens, home brewing ...

[zxcvbob]

I even lost interest in home brewing once I "mastered" mashing pale grain malt. But I've been thinking I should dust off my equipment and try it again and see how much I've forgotten; see if I can still brew a drinkable beer.

-Bob

[Billy]

Too young to hit with a slide rule, huh?

[Nad R]

Wow! That's massive! My township I live in has less than 5,000 people for

100 square miles... You must be living on top of each other :) no wonder you only have space for just a couple of plants :)

[Derald]

Well, that's worth something. Besides, having done it, you now know _how_ to do it and the knowledge may be important to you one day. Learned skills sometimes seem to spread into other areas of ones life. I'm with you on the canned tomatoes. Except for some store brands and "no-names", which often contain too high a percentage of overripe and spoiled fruit, most of canned tomatoes are cookie-cutter. As long a "Cento" keeps putting the little plum jobbies into cans, we're covered in the spaghetti sauce department. If they're good enough for Lidia Bastianich, they're certainly good enough for my old cracker self. Oh, and "Goya" Spanish style tomato sauce.

Same here. We cook them with a tiny bit of salt until "almost" done and then freeze them. That way, they don't overcook when reheated. Besides, why fool with blanching when, for the price of just a little more gas, one can have ready-made leftovers? Always grow a couple of varieties of snap beans and try to grow baby limas, when the grasshoppers will let me.

...and we're to believe you surprised? Certainly no parent is ;-) That's just the way things go, sometimes.

I can offer only sympathy; for a number of reasons, our garden hasn't had any corn in it for quite a few years. We just buy it when in season and relatively cheap, although, it never is fresh "enough".

[Sue]

:o) I understand. I used to live in a small town in Alaska.

[Sue]

The Early Girl were labeled as determinate. Oops. Sue

[Nad R]

I wish I was perfect :( Sounds like you know the process of selecting the kind of tomato you want. Now where did I put that Arecept memory drug.

[Sue]

I was oopsing at me. I thought the label was wrong. ;o) Sue - with memory issues of her own.