FOR MY FIRST FIFTEEN YEARS OF LIFE, ANY CONTACT with raw tomatoes made me break out in an itchy, red rash. This was a hard thing in a household of tomato fans, particularly during the months of July, August, and September, when our backyard plants were growing prodigiously and all my mom wanted to make for dinner were salads of cucumber and sliced ripe tomato. I was also wary of cooked tomatoes and would only eat pasta sauces that were puréed smooth. It was a pain for everyone involved.
Thankfully, around the time I turned sixteen, the allergy disappeared and I discovered just why people raved about homegrown tomatoes. They are amazing. Since then, I’ve spent my summers making up for those lost years. I eat them with every meal where they make sense and I typically can up to a hundred pounds of locally grown paste or Roma tomatoes every September (always praising my body for having the smarts to outgrow that allergy). My goal is to put up enough local tomatoes to ensure that I won’t run out until May or June.
Most years, the bulk of my tomato preservation is done in quarts of whole, peeled tomatoes. I find them to be the most versatile when it comes to cooking (and, when you’re trying to move a hundred pounds of tomatoes through your kitchen in a three-day weekend, a single, streamlined process is your friend). If I’m not in too much of a rush, I also make a basic tomato sauce (truly, no more than a smooth, basil-spiked version of the whole peeled tomatoes), a marinara/pizza sauce (for those nights when you need something that’s a little closer to being ready to eat than a jar of whole tomatoes), and a couple variations on chopped tomatoes.
Anytime you talk about canning tomatoes, the issue of acid content must be considered. We all think of tomatoes as being incredibly high in acid, right? But when it comes to having enough acid for boiling water bath canning, tomatoes are actually in the grey zone. Plums and apples have more acid than a basic tomato does. This means that tomato products have to have acid added to them to be safe for canning. You may be thinking, “But my grandma never added acid to her tomatoes and we were always fine.” There’s a good reason for that. Modern tomatoes have been bred to be sweeter and lower in acid. Nice for today’s palate, but not so good for canning safety. It’s easy enough to remedy the acid situation when it comes to canning by adding lemon juice to your products before canning. Make sure you don’t skip or reduce the amount of acid in the following recipes, as it a key player in ensuring the safety of your finished products.