Old Fashioned On Purpose

S15 E14: The Ultimate Tomato Episode: Preserving, Canning, Controversary, & More!

• Season 15 • Episode 14

Share episode

If your kitchen counters are currently covered in garden veggies like mine, this is the episode for you!

We're talking all things tomatoes today: from how to make fresh sauce, to making tomato powder, to the controversary surrounding canning practices, to my favorite versatile sauce and so much more!

Podcast Episode Highlights

  • My thoughts on growing tomatoes...
  • Ripening green tomatoes
  • What to do when you're getting just a handful of tomatoes at a time
  • What to do when you're getting buckets of tomatoes at a time
  • Waterbath vs. pressure canning tomatoes 

Resources Mentioned in This Podcast Episode:

Learn more about the planner here: www.prairieplanner.com

Find my Fast Tomato Sauce recipe here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2018/09/fast-tomato-sauce-recipe.html

Find my Dehydrated Vegetable Powders tutorial here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2021/11/how-to-make-dehydrated-vegetable-powders.html

Find my Canned All-Purpose Tomato Sauce recipe here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2020/09/can-tomato-sauce.html

OTHER HELPFUL RESOURCES FOR YOUR HOMESTEAD:


Did you enjoy listening to this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review to let us know. This can help other folks learn about this podcast and we also really appreciate the feedback!

So I originally had a different topic to discuss today here on the show, but considering that tomatoes are basically consuming the entirety of my life at the moment, I decided to shift directions just a little bit. So I currently have tomatoes. Covering my kitchen counters. They are desperately needing to be harvested from the garden. They are monopolizing my to do list. So if you happen to find yourself in that same position right now, or maybe someday you hope to find yourself in that position, well, this episode is going to be packed full of tomato goodness. So buckle up and let's roll. Welcome to Old Fashioned On Purpose. This is a show where we look at what we have left behind as we have raced towards progress as a culture and how we can get the good pieces back into our modern lives. And it just so happens that a big part of the good stuff that we have left behind as industrialization has taken over is food related. And that's one of my favorite topics. And I'm excited to get to talk about that today in the realm of tomatoes. So. Why are tomatoes such a big deal to homesteaders? Well, maybe not all homesteaders, but I would say that most home gardeners and homesteaders, we include a lot of space for tomatoes in our gardens. And even if you don't love fresh tomatoes, honestly, I don't need a lot of fresh tomatoes. My family just, we just don't, my kids, we Do a little bit, but not a ton. Um, but even without the fresh tomato consumption, we use a lot of tomato sauce throughout the year. And so one of my goals for a long time has been to grow all of our tomato products. So I'm not having to buy those at the store. store. And even though I live in Wyoming, aka the Arctic, I have been able to accomplish that for quite a few years now. And so I consider myself a little bit of a lazy tomato grower. I'm not the person you want to come to if you want to talk about the finer points of tomato gardening. If you want to talk about fancy heirloom varieties, it's like down and dirty. Let's get this done and put the things in jars. And so that's kind of my, angle on the tomatoes. But all of that said, even though Wyoming is not hospitable to something like tomatoes, really, I get it done, right? And I have figured out a lot of different quirks and tips and tricks over the years, both in the growing and in the preservation. And so I wanted to share some of that super actionable information with you today, because I think, in fact, I know, When we come to harvest time and we're feeling that crunch of everything needing to be addressed at once, all the stuff needing to be preserved, everything needing to be harvested, I find, and maybe you do too, that tomatoes are one of the most high maintenance items on that list. They're one of the biggest stress points just because, you know, they come in in weird batches. Sometimes it's a trickle. Sometimes it's an avalanche. Um, there's so many options. You're like, what do I do with them? They can be fussy if you pick the wrong, I'm gonna say wrong. It isn't maybe the word, but like, a different method than I use. They can be very fussy to preserve and very time consuming. So anyway, I've waded through a lot of that over the years. And so I want to share kind of my conclusions and my methods with you today. So let's kind of start first things first, growing tomatoes. And I'm not going to go into great detail here because I have other episodes on that. And I don't think really very many people are planting tomatoes at the moment, but just a little bit of a bird's eye view. I grow probably. Around 80 to 100 tomato plants each year. I start all the seeds myself. I primarily grow San Marzano or Amish paste tomatoes. I have for years. I occasionally grow a token cherry tomato plant or a token slicing tomato plant. Usually my kids talk me into it in the spring and I give in and they're like, Mom, we want the big fresh slicing tomatoes. My kids are like, those are like a real tomato. So all you grow are the. the oval placed tomatoes. My poor children are so, um, slided, you know, these homestead kids. So like this year, I grew some really beautiful heirloom, um, big slicing tomatoes and they kind of were like, eh, once they were ripe. So I'm like, this is why we grow the paste because y'all don't do a lot of fresh eating. But anyway, I still will throw those heirloom slicers if they're getting squishy or they're not being eaten. I'll throw them into my sauces and all the other stuff I do. But anyway, primarily it's San Marzano. I love that variety. and or Amish paste. You could also do Roma's, there's other paste tomatoes out there. They're going to be similar, but those are the ones I love. They do great here in Wyoming. Like I hinted at a minute ago, I'm not a tomato growing guru. I do not trellis, which I intend to almost every year. I never follow through. It is a character flaw of mine. And I usually regret it come about now when I'm harvesting and I'm like digging through this jungle of tomato vines, and I'm having, you know, it's just a mess, right? And there are some tomatoes that touch the ground that get eaten by slugs or rotted. Not a ton though, and so honestly, I kind of don't regret my lazy lack of trellising too very much, because just with the way my gardens are trellising is a lot of work. I don't have an easy system there. So I don't know, maybe someday I'll finally do that. Probably not. And even though it doesn't look as beautiful, I still grow a ton of tomatoes without trellising. So I'll let you decide if you want to do that in your garden, but I don't. And we survive. Um, the other piece of this, like I also mentioned earlier is Wyoming is not tropical. Wyoming does not have a long growing season. And a lot of people think tomatoes need tropics and very extended growing months. So I have definitely broken that stereotype with a few considerations. The main consideration being that I expect to harvest most of my tomatoes green. I accept it, it doesn't surprise me, it doesn't startle me, and it's totally fine. And I see posts every single year on Facebook about this time where they're like, Oh my gosh, guys, I grew tons of tomatoes, but they're all green, and am I gonna lose them all? And I'm like, No, no, no. The cool thing about tomatoes, which doesn't apply to other items, like melons don't ripen off the vine, squash don't really ripen off the vine, But tomatoes do, and they do it beautifully. So I expect, every fall, that I'm going to be harvesting primarily green tomatoes. I pull them off the plants. Like I, um, right, we haven't had a frost yet. It's September 17th, I think, at the time of this recording. We haven't had a frost. We could have a frost any day. Like our, generally, we've had frost by now. So I'm leaving them on there as long as I can, but I will pull them off when I know the weather warnings are coming and we're going to get snow or frost. Um, and so I have some tomatoes starting to ripen. I did a batch of tomato sauce yesterday with vine ripened tomatoes, but I know the rest will be green when I pull them in. There's a lot of urban legends about ripening green tomatoes on the internet, and a lot of them are ridiculous. So here's how this works, friends. Pull the green tomatoes off the plant, put them in a cardboard box. It can be an open box. It can be a closed box. It can be a box in your mudroom. It can be a box in your basement. It doesn't really matter. Just put them in a box. Check them, uh, every couple of days because you'll have some starting, start to ripen faster than others and some will rot. And you want to get the rotted ones out as fast as possible so they don't contaminate the rest of the box and make everything else rot fast. Um, but other than that, do not. wrap them individually in newspaper. I've seen that recommendation so many times and I have to laugh because not only does it do nothing for you, can you imagine wrapping hundreds of paste tomatoes individually in newspaper? I cannot. No, thank you. So don't wrap them up. Um, another legend, and maybe this works supposedly better, but again, I don't know why you would go to this trouble. And I have tried this just for fun. Fun to see if it worked any better, and it did not. In my experimentation, people will say, pull the entire tomato plant out of the ground and hang it like upside down in a place that won't freeze. Um, number one, if you have a large tomato plant like mine, that's very complicated and hairy and crumbly and messy. Um, and also getting it to hold together. And the tomatoes to stay on the vine while you're jostling it around. That's a feat. Then hauling that into like a garage, you're going to be shedding tomato leaves and dirt everywhere. So when I did this, it was incredibly messy. My husband was not impressed. And the tomatoes that were on those plants hanging upside down in the garage. Didn't ripen any faster than the ones that were sitting in a cardboard box. So again, that's the internet has so many recommendations like that. They just get perpetuated over and over and over again. And I'm like, why are we doing this? It doesn't make sense. And there's faster and easier ways. So do it if you want, but I find just stick them in a cardboard box. Check them and you'll be fine. And sometimes they'll ripen in a week. Sometimes they'll ripen in a month. It just depends on the tomato, but they almost all ripen. You'll have a few that just are kind of get shriveled or weird, but for the most part, it's okay if you grow a crop primarily just to harvest them green. Awesome. Okay. So those are my. my growing and harvesting recommendations. Now let's get into the first problem of growing tomatoes is when you have, let's say you're, you're growing a quantity and you're expecting a quantity, but you only have a few ripe at a time. That's really frustrating because as you know, it takes a lot of tomatoes to make a sauce or, um, anything that you're going to can because they cook down so much there. There's so much water in a tomato. less so if you're using a paste tomato, but still there are, there's a lot of water in these things. So they cook down. So you need a lot to make any. amount of sauce. So when you have 10 tomatoes at a time or 20 tomatoes at a time, it's really annoying. So here's what I do when I have that situation. So, um, up until right about now, I've been dealing with just a handful, a token bowl of tomatoes every so often. So the first thing I like to do is just take advantage of the freshness. So I have a Simple, small batch, fresh sauce recipe. If you have my cookbook, it's in there. Otherwise I believe it's on the blog, the prairiehomestead. com. Just search tomato. There's a million tomato posts there. You'll find it. And it's so bright and so delicious. You literally just saute some onions and garlic. You throw, you dice up your fresh tomatoes, throw them in there, cook them down. You're not going to cook, like cook them down to death. So you're not going to get that dark, rich tomato sauce. You're going to cook some of the water out. You're going to puree them. So they're saucy, right? But you're not going to just cook them down for hours, but it just, it's a bright red sauce. It's so bright. It's so delicious. You can add some fresh basil in there. Um, I love it on It's good for pizza. It's good for spaghetti sauce, marinara, whatever. So that's something I like to do for smaller batches, number one. Number two, I also have done this recently. I had a couple bowls of tomatoes. that were starting to go squishy, there's no way I had time to do anything with them of substance. So I washed them. I trimmed off any bad spots and I trimmed off the ends. Um, if they were like a slicing tomato, I kind of squeezed out or pressed out as much of the liquid as I could in like Two seconds, right? I didn't go in there and go crazy, but just like a quick squish to get liquid out. I didn't have to do that much on my paste tomatoes. They were basically liquidless. And then I just popped them whole into a freezer bag, a Ziploc bag, and just had a couple bags, stuck them in the freezer and left them alone. Now, my intention with those guys are to either bring them out and make little batches of fresh sauce if I need that down the road, or when I do finally have enough to make the sauce, I'm doing a big batch of sauce, or I'm doing a sauce making day, which I'll probably do in the next week, because I'm starting to accumulate. I'll bring those out, defrost them, and add them to my sauce batch. But that way I can just start to accumulate in the Ziploc bags, and I can amass the quantity I need. Another thing I do when I have small quantities, I like to make salsas, whether it's a quick cooked salsa or a freezer salsa, or it's a pico de gallo type of salsa. That's an awesome option if you grow any sort of peppers. The cool thing about this time of year, at least in my growing zone, is I have tomatoes, chili peppers, garlic, and onions already at the same time. And so you can literally make a garden salsa. It's just one of the most fulfilling things I do in the kitchen, I think is to go harvest all the salsa ingredients, bring it in and chop it up. It's just delicious. And so that's a great way to use up a handful of tomatoes. And then finally, my last small quantity trick, or at least the last one I can think of right now is dehydration. And I have I have posts on all of these on the blog because I just think about tomatoes a lot, I guess. more than the average person. Um, so if you have a dehydrator, any kind of dehydrator, you can do a couple things with tomatoes. The first thing you can do is just slice them and stick them on the trays, dry them till they're leathery. They're bendable, um, but the moisture is gone and then you can pop them in jars. They'll stay good in your cupboards for a long time. And when you're ready, you can rehydrate them with a little bit of oil, some basil, some salt, and you can kind of duplicate that sun dried tomato And when I say rehydrate, I should have clarified in a little pot of like simmering water, just a little bit of water, just enough to rehydrate, get them soft. And then I add a little bit of olive oil and some seasoning. And when I need a sun dried tomato in a recipe, that's kind of what I do. Um, not exactly what you get at the store, but it's close enough. Or sometimes my kids just eat the tomato pieces, the tomato chunks, um, as snacks. They like that for some reason. The other thing I love to do with a dehydrator, and I've talked about it here on the show before, are powders. I am obsessed with powders. Um, so to do the powders, you have a couple options. You can make a quick puree with the seeds, with the skins, put it on your dehydrator trays, kind of like you're making fruit leather, dry it till it's brittle. And then you can grind it up in a food processor or a blender. Um, I've also done it where I just take those slices, like I just mentioned, and I collect enough of them in a big jar. And then I powder them in a high powered blender. It's a little bit messy. There's a few things to keep in mind. Um, but I have all the instructions for that on the blog and we'll put that in the show notes. I'm going to write that down right now. So I remember to stick that in here. Uh, but that's a really awesome option. So last night I made some fresh sauce. Um, I let it simmer a couple hours when I went to taste it, it was not as. that I didn't have that rich tomato taste yet that I was really wanting. It tasted good, but just not like didn't pack the punch. And so I went and grabbed a couple spoonfuls of the tomato powder I did up last year and added that to the sauce and it immediately brought that depth of flavor. I also have completely stopped buying the little cans of tomato paste since I purchased or since I've started. excuse me, powdering my tomatoes. Um, if you try to can paste, you can totally do it. It's pretty labor intensive and you're cooking it down forever. And so the thing I love about using powder as paste is I can make just as much as I need. So if I need three tablespoons of paste for a recipe, because I mean, let's be honest, how many times have you thrown away a half used can of tomato paste? Like I do it almost every time I've opened one. I hate that. And so if I have my powder, I'm turning that into a paste. I make only as much as I need. I'm not throwing anything away and I'm not having to cook down the sauce for a million days to get enough paste to can. So just something to keep in mind. Um, I'd say powders are probably. My number one favorite way to use my dehydrator is that it just is awesome. Okay, so that's the small quantity techniques. If you're dealing with just the trickle, that's what I recommend you doing. Um, one of those options. Now, if you are past trickle point and you are now in fire hose realm, which I am right on the tipping point of that right now, um, here's how I handle that.

Jill Winger:

Friends, I'm interrupting this episode because I have a big announcement today, one I've been waiting to tell you about. The 2025 Old Fashioned On Purpose Planner is here. It is ready for you to order. We wanted to get it out earlier than ever this year, so you have plenty of time to start thinking about 2025. 25. And I can say without a doubt, this is our best planner yet. We took all the features you love from previous years, plus some things you've been asking for, and rolled them all into this edition. So the first thing you'll notice, there are tabs. Hallelujah. We have tabs for all of the months and the sections. That's been a huge sticking point for so many of you. We finally got it done. The cover is durable PVC. The paper is Luxurious. If I do say so myself, it's thick and silky and it's not going to bleed. We have monthly spreads. We have weekly spreads. We have spots for your menus, your garden, your kitchen, your animal records, what you're reading, your goals for the year, your project mapping. It's all in here and lots more. This is almost 300 pages of organizational goodness, and it will help keep your old fashioned life on track. regardless of whether you live on a hundred acres or you're homesteading in your backyard. So we have a set number of these that we have printed. We will sell out this year, so don't wait too long. Head on over to prairieplanner. com to get a full look at the inside of all the features and to get your copy. Also, we have a special limited run of some Custom planner stickers, um, that you can add on to your order. We're selling out of these as we speak. So if you want the stickers, definitely grab your planner sooner versus later. Prairie planner dot com. I cannot wait for you to try it and definitely post some pictures and tag me over on social once you start putting all of your old fashioned goodness inside

okay, so for large quantities, I'm talking dozens of pounds, hundreds of pounds, etc. Whether you are buying them at your farmer's market, getting them from a friend or growing them yourself. Canning is, I believe, the best way to deal with that. If you are trying to dehydrate that quantity, whether you have a freeze dryer, or a regular dehydrator, That's going to take you a very long time because trays are only so big on either sort of machine and you're going to be Flipping trays and swapping out trays for weeks at a time and your tomatoes probably won't last that long So I think canning in this instance makes the most sense and it's really a classic technique I mean everyone remembers relatives or grandmas or mothers canning tomato sauce is one of the favorite things to can There's also a million recommendations for that, a million techniques, a million different ways you can can tomatoes. And so how do you sort through all of the conflicting information? And here's how I do that. This is just my method. Do what you want, but here's how I think through this. So some of the favorite ways to can tomatoes would be sauce, of course, salsas, diced tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, whole tomatoes, etc. And time and again, I've tried all of them. I've tried many, many different ways to put tomatoes in jars. I go back to sauce because if you are going to go for the whole tomato or the diced tomato techniques, they usually require almost always peeling. And the reason that you peel them is because if you leave those peels on, they tend to kind of come apart in the jars during the processing. And they float around, and it's weird, and they have a weird texture, and they just kind of ruin the experience. So I'm not saying you couldn't leave the peels on, but like, you're just, you just don't. Generally, we're peeling tomatoes. And to peel a tomato, you're going to drop it into boiling water for a minute or two, then drop it into ice water for a minute or two, and then the peel should feasibly slip off. They do most of the time. Sometimes you have to help it a little bit. So if you have this cute little token, a batch of tomatoes, and you want to do like three pints of stewed tomatoes, then I would say peel to your heart's content. If you're staring down the barrel of 200 pounds of paste tomatoes, I mean, you're going to drive yourself insane trying to peel them all. Like, I don't want to do that. As much as I love old fashioned things and food and preservation, like I will not subject myself to that insanity. I'm not peeling my freaking. tomatoes when I have that much. So in that instance, sauce is the way to go. Um, now, some sauce recipes, bless their hearts, will tell you to peel them. Absolutely not, friend. We don't do that. We will not do that. Like, promise me you're not going to peel your tomatoes one by one for sauce. Here's what you're going to do instead. You have two options. The first option, if you have no really special equipment, you can, and here's what I did yesterday, you can it. Cut off the bad spots of the tomatoes, cut off the ends and the little stem guy. Squeeze out, if there's a ton of juice in them, you can squeeze it out or just leave it in. And I threw all the tomatoes in a pot. As it's just like trim, plop, trim, plop. Um, I added garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and I started cooking it down. And as the tomatoes cook down, they release a ton of water. In fact, my daughter went and she was stirring it. And she's like, why did you put water in here? And I'm like, I didn't, that's the tomatoes releasing their juice. There's so much juice in there. And then as we go, I cook that water out and then I will take my immersion blender and I blend it right in the pot, seeds, skin, and all. And I've done that many, many times, whether it's for a batch of sauce that evening for supper, or it's a canning adventure, it's fine. Will you occasionally get a teeny minuscule piece of peel that you can see? Yes. Will you see a seed occasionally? Yes. I do not think it hurts the finished product at all. My family is used to it now. What a, uh, you know. Five star tomato purist have an issue with it, maybe, but I don't know any of those and I really don't care what they think anyway. So I say it's awesome. It's easy. Um, you could, if you don't have an immersion blender, you would take that sauce and put it into a regular blender or a food processor. That's so messy with hot liquids. And if you have a lot, it's a pain in the butt. So buy a 30 immersion blender, you'll use it a ton and just blend it up right in the pot and call it good. Okay. Now, if you want to go a little more, next level and you really don't want the peels or the seeds. Um, also if you're doing other things like applesauce, I would suggest investing in a food mill. I think they're, they're probably 50 bucks or less, probably more like 30 or 40 bucks. Um, mine is a Victoria brand. It's plastic. It's not like the highest quality machine, but it works. I've used it for many, many years. So a food mill is something that you can run primarily apples or tomatoes through. You can, you can run other foods through it and you crank it, you use a plunder, you stuff the tomatoes into the hopper, you crank it and out comes a sauce and it automatically removes the seeds and the skin. And it's, they're very dry when they come out and you can either give those to your chickens. or your pigs, or you can put those skins and seeds on a dehydrator tray, dehydrate them, and turn that into powder. So you've got options. And when I have a lot of tomatoes to deal with, I generally do use my food mill. The kids are recruited at that point, and they actually like it. They think it's fun. It's, it makes the kitchen an absolute bloodbath of tomato sauce. Like, we have sauce on the the ceilings, the refrigerator, the floors, the cabinets. It's very messy, but we just do it all at once. And then we do a deep clean. Um, and we just crank out, um, sometimes up to hundreds of pounds of tomatoes through the food mill. And then I cook it down and it cooks down very nicely in the pot. And so, That's what I do most of the time. But again, if I'm doing a quick batch, I don't want to bring out the food, like yesterday, I just didn't feel like it. And so we just blended it all up. You can decide what the way you want to go with that. That's going to give you your basic, plain tomato sauce. Then the question is, well, what do you add to that? So you could technically can it just like that, just plain old tomato puree cooked down. Um, and it's gonna be pretty, pretty bland, but you could always season it when it comes out of the jar. So that's one option. What I like to do is I like to add just enough salt, pepper, and some flavoring agents in there to make it taste really good right out of the jar. But It's still simple enough that it could go Italian, it could go pizza, it could go Mexican, it could go enchilada sauce, it could go a lot of different ways. And so instead of making six different tomato sauces with different flavorings, I just make the one and then I season it accordingly once I'm ready to use it. So what this looks like, and I'm also going to put this recipe on the blog, it actually is already on the blog, I'll put the link in the show notes. Um, I use Garlic and onion, and I usually process those in my food processor, so they're very, very fine. And then I, we sauté them in, or actually I have sautéed them in olive oil, or sometimes I just throw them right into the sauce and let it cook down, because it's going to be cooking a long time. Salt, pepper, and a little bit of sugar. Now, you don't have to put sugar in, um, and this is a tiny bit of sugar, but the reason I do love sugar in Tomato sauce just a little bit. It helps to cut the flavor that the acidic flavor that acidic tang. Now, we want that in a tomato. It's important for a variety of reasons, one of which we're going to get into in a minute. But sometimes some varieties of tomatoes And in some stages of ripeness are more acidic than others. And I have had, uh, some batches of sauce over the years. It's just, it's really bitter or it's really acid. And like the one I had last year and so far this year, they're shaping up to be extra sweet. So I'm not really adding sugar to the sauces here this year, but in previous years, I did add a couple tablespoons to the recipe just to help. So that's pretty much what I add. You can get the exact. formula on the blog, and I'll put that link in the show notes. Um, and I cook that down for a couple hours. Sometimes I do the cooking down of the sauce on one day, because usually by the time I process them, cook it down, it's like nine o'clock at night. And I do know what I can at that point. So I'll put it in the fridge and then I'll bring it back up to temperature the following day and can it. That is what I have done for years. It works great. I don't buy tomato sauce anymore. I prefer to put it in quarts. Um, you could also put it in pints if you have a smaller family. More often than not with a family of five we're using a quart, needing a quart, or if I need a pint I just use half the quart jar and save the rest for pizza or something later in the week. Okay, so now we're going to get into the controversial part of this topic, which makes people yell at me every time I bring it up online. So this is fun. Who would have thought tomatoes could be so controversial? Let's talk about water bath versus pressure canning for tomatoes. And let's also talk about should you add acid to your jars? Okay, so current canning recommendations. And even saying that is controversial because There's this belief online that, um, sometimes the USDA provides canning recommendations. That's an arm of their organization, right? There's also independent. Um, Organizations and different universities that also provide canning recommendations. But there's this strange belief, sometimes floating around canning circles, that the government is trying to hurt our home food production by putting regulations on canning. I'm not, they don't even have regulations, they have recommendations, right? There's not a, it's not an illegal way to can. It's not a regulation for home canners. It's a recommendation. I think it's really silly. Um, I think it's incredibly silly, that belief. I just don't buy into that also because it's like science and you don't have to follow it if you don't want to. And I'll honestly, if the government was just trying to really discourage everyone from home canning, I don't think they would have like canning recommendations, they're, they would just tell you not to do it. But that's not that's not what's happening. But anyway, before I dig myself any deeper into this hole, and get a lot of angry emails, I do pay attention to canning. test kitchen recommendations because they are testing the science of this. Um, canning is fairly new. It's a hundred ish years old. Um, and so there's things we know now that we didn't know back when great great grandma was canning during the depression. And the argument I always get from folks is, well, great grandma canned meat in a water bath canner open on an open fire and she didn't die. I'm like, cool, that's awesome. But some of her friends did, or some of her friends children's did die from botulism. People did die from that back in the day. Not a, not millions, but it did happen and unsafe canning practices did cause illness and death. I don't want to play that game with my family. And when I'm giving away home canned food, I don't want to have to hope that what I'm giving them doesn't have botulism in it. Like, I don't like that stress. I don't need that stress. And so I like to look at the science and the recommendations, understand why they're recommending it and follow it when it makes sense. When it comes to tomatoes, traditionally, because they are and have been a high acid food, generally, generally, we all have water bathroom, great grandma, water bathroom, grandma, water bathroom, your mom, maybe water bath. And that's just been the way we have processed tomatoes. And for the most part, you can still do that. Fine. You're going to, you're going to be fine. However, there are different forms of modern tomatoes, hybrid tomatoes, or sometimes they're depending on how ripe the tomato is will affect how much acid it has in it. Um, sometimes the tomatoes aren't as acidic as we originally thought. Now that we have more data, we have more science. Science isn't a bad thing, contrary to popular belief. So, um, now that we have more data that maybe tomatoes aren't always acidic, there have been recommendations in recent history that, hey, you can either acidify the tomatoes, with some extra acid like vinegar or lemon juice, or if you don't want to do that, you can pressure can them because you can pressure can any low acid food and you'll be fine. So that's where that recommendation comes from. Like I said, you can still get away with probably plain old water bathing without acid, but you know, if you don't want to have to worry about your tomatoes going bad in the jar, um, and you don't feel like messing with pH strips to test the acidity, what I like to do just to cover my bases is I add two tablespoons of lemon juice to a quart jar of sauce. just to make it acidified enough. I don't pressure can my sauce because I don't think I just don't need to if I'm adding the lemon juice and I, it's fine, right? That's the method I like to follow. Um, you could also use vinegar. You could use apple cider vinegar or a white vinegar. Just make sure it's 5%. homemade vinegars, it's hard to tell exactly what percentage they are. So you just want to get a bottle of vinegar that's 5%. You'll be fine. So 2 tablespoons per quart, 1 tablespoon per pint covers your basis. You're good to go. It doesn't really affect the flavor. I think it's fine. I think it's simple and I just do it cause it's easy. Um, another thing to consider here, if you are. Making a sauce with lots of extra ingredients. So sometimes you want to do a really veggie heavy sauce with lots of garlic or lots of onions or bell peppers, or sometimes people grind up carrots and put it in their tomato sauce. Like there's lots of things you can do. Every time you add those vegetables in, it's going to reduce the acidity of the finished sauce because those are low acid vegetables. So if you're following a recipe from one of the test kitchens, whether it's Ball or the National Center for Home Food Preservation, like if you're following their ratios, you're fine. If you start to go rogue. That's fine, too. If you want to add more bell peppers, etc, you just probably are going to need to pressure can that sauce if you get way off of those ratio recommendations, because then you may be having a really, really non acidic sauce, um, and we need to use that pressure can to get that heat high enough to preserve it. At room temperature, right? So with the recipe on my blog that I'll link in the show notes, I'm following the ratios of, I think it was ball. Um, so you're good to water bath it with a little bit of lemon juice, but if you want to go DIY that, just pressure can it, and then you don't have to worry about it. Again, this is not, um, the government, I just don't buy into that, that the government's trying to discourage home canning by saying you should use a pressure canner. That's silly. So do what you want. You're a grown up, um, probably if you're listening to this, but that's how I think of tomatoes. And that's how I think of canning recommendation in general is you just want to get that acidity where it needs to be. Um, now one note, and we're talking about acidic sauce, sometimes the sauce can be bitter. I found, um, the, like I said, the last two years, my tomatoes have been wonderfully sweet. In prior years, I've had some that just turned out wolf. They're pretty rough when they came out of the jar. So what I like to do in that instance, and this is what I do after it's been canned and when I'm ready to start using it in recipes, I open the jar, right? If it is a little bit bitter, um, you could add a little more sugar, but sometimes if you add too much sugar, then it turns into sweet sauce and that's kind of gross. So I will take the teeniest bit of baking soda. I'm talking like a pinch. And I will add that to my sauce, whether it's in the sauce pan, you know, before I add the rest of the ingredients or in the jar, it'll kind of fall a little bit because the baking soda is reacting with the acid in the sauce, but it's also neutralizing just a little bit. And. Like, I use a tiny bit, so I'm not tasting the baking soda. But I find it'll help neutralize it just enough. And if I add a little pinch of sugar as well, that will take a bitter sauce down to something that tastes pretty darn good. I wish I understood why some sauces are bitter and some aren't. Haven't got into that. Oh data yet, but I just know that some taste better than others. So that's my tomato technique friends. Um, It's been working well for me for a long time And you know i've tried various other forms. I think last year I did some enchilada sauce Oh, I did make a ketchup last year. That was really good. Um But the sauce remains my standby, and we have that technique down, and I use it for pizza, we use it for spaghetti, marinara, I sometimes will put it in soups, and all kinds of things, and it's just, it's a great way to use that homegrown food for a really, useful purpose. And it's replacing something that you don't have to buy at the grocery store. So I hope this episode is helpful for you. As you are digging yourself out of your vegetable avalanche, it's probably on your kitchen counter as well at the moment. This is actually Our last episode for this season. So I'm going to take a couple week break and hopefully give myself a little time to build up, uh, a few episodes. I've been kind of recording and publishing really quick and I didn't really like to have some in my library. So I'm going to take a little break. I'm going to get some episodes recorded. I have some really awesome guests coming on. I'm excited to bring them to you in the coming months. Um, yeah, in the meantime though, happy preserving, happy harvest season for most of you. Uh, some of you are putting your garden to bed for the winter, which I have to I have a few things growing for fall, but I'm kind of excited to have a little break, uh, of the season. It's been a good, good season, but a long one. So I'm ready to have a little garden break other than what I'll be growing in the greenhouse. So I wish you luck over the next few weeks. Make sure you grab your copy of the Old Fashioned On Purpose Planner if you haven't already. The stickers are going to be selling out, I think, in a couple weeks. So the planner, we'll still have planners in stock, but the add on stickers are moving quick. So make sure you grab your copy so you can start mapping out your gardens. You can track your canning for the next year, you can track your planting and all that good stuff. So thanks for listening, friends. Happy tomatoing. And I will catch up with you on the next episode of Old Fashioned On Purpose.