Home Canning Tomatoes

Today was tomato canning day as I joined two of my friends and their families in their annual tomato canning project. We ordered 12 bushels of plum tomatoes from a local farm and washed, cooked, crushed, cooked again and canned them all into 180 quart jars of homemade tomato sauce! My friends have been doing this every August for at least the last decade, so they have the process down pat by now, but wow--what an impressive project. I kept my phone in my pocket so I could snap a few pics along the way.

This is about half of the tomatoes...
washed and ready to be cooked.

Tomato day started bright and early at 7am in my friend's backyard with five adults and two helpful teenagers. We were set up on her driveway, patio and a bit of her lawn area with the different stations--cleaning tomatoes, cooking tomatoes, processing tomatoes, and cooking and canning the sauce.

The first cooking process.

Giving the tomatoes a stir.

While the burners for cooking the tomatoes were being set up by my friend's husband, the rest of us started washing the tomatoes in tubs of water and cutting away any damaged or moldy parts, of which there was very little. Out of 12 bushels of plum tomatoes--which is upwards of 636 lbs of tomatoes, we may have had only 1 or 2 lbs of tomato waste when we were done washing.

Tomato cooking well under way.

Once the three burners were set up and lit, tomatoes were put in the huge stock pots with a bit of water to prevent burning and they were cooked until they started to break down. In the meantime, we kept washing more tomatoes and several bunches of fresh basil.

Fresh basil for the tomato sauce

Cooked tomatoes waiting to go through the tomato mill

Once the tomatoes were turning into stewed tomatoes, they were spooned into a mill made especially for processing tomatoes. The tomatoes are essentially crushed and skin and seeds of the tomatoes are separated from the sauce. The skins and seeds go into a bucket and the sauce goes down a little chute into another big huge stock pot.

Processing the cooked tomatoes into sauce.

Below is another view of the tomato mill. You can see the skins and seeds going into the bucket on the left and the sauce goes down the chute into the pot on the right.

Another view of the tomato mill

The huge stock pot of sauce now gets put onto another burner where it cooks down some more, this time with handfuls of fresh basil and kosher salt.

Tomato sauce with basil
simmering away,  almost ready to be ladled into jars.

When the sauce gets a little thickened, it gets ladled into quart-size canning jars. One person ladled the sauce into the jars using a funnel and two others put the lids and bands on, wiping the rims as needed. The sauce is so hot that a proper seal was created as the sauce started to cool without having to process them in water. I've always processed jam in water, so I had a little trouble trusting this process without the water, but soon we heard all the lids popping sealed, so it worked! An hour or two later I checked all the jars I brought home and they were all sealed.

Gorgeous jars of homemade tomato sauce.

By the time the last of the jars were filled, clean up was well under way. Pots were scrubbed, the mill was cleaned and all supplies were put away. By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, you'd never know tomato day had taken place. Unless, of course, you visited the basements of these three families. There you'd find dozens of jars of homemade tomato sauce just waiting to be cooked into spectacular meals for our families over the next year. :)

I've canned homemade fruit jams many times in the past, but have never canned tomato sauce before. Nor have I been a part of such a big production as this was today, but thanks to the years of experience and fine tuning, the work was efficient and the day went very smoothly. I'm curious to see how long my 30 jars of tomato sauce last me. February? April? Will I make it to the next tomato canning day in August 2013? We shall see.


Have you ever canned your own tomato sauce? Jam? Pickles? Anything else? 

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