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Canning Tomato Passata

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The end of summer is a delicious time. The last month or two we have had tons of zucchinis, eggplant, onions, apples, peaches and more but just maybe the most delicious – beautiful tomatoes. We eat as many as we can and bottle the rest as sauce. I can’t recommend this enough – if you can start with good, ripe tomatoes and make a simple sauce the difference between home made and bought sauces is mind blowing.

If you’re growing your own tomatoes it makes sense to save up as many as possible and do one big sauce making session. This usually means picking as they ripen and storing in the fridge for a few days while stocks slowly build up. When we haven’t grown our own some years we have bought a few boxes from farmers markets or grocers.

The best way we’ve found to make a simple sauce is to simmer the tomatoes in big pots until just soft, then let them sit in a colander for a minute to drain. Or you could try the approach of roasting your tomatoes first – this does look pretty tasty I admit! After cooking, use a tomato mill like the one I reviewed here last year or a mouli (vegetable mill) to get the skin and seeds out. You can jar them at this point but you’ll probably end up with quite a runny sauce, which will separate in the jars. This isn’t such a bad thing but this year we took our sauce and simmered it over low heat for a few hours, until reduced in volume by about a quarter. The taste of this reduced sauce… I’m drooling again thinking about it.

There are lots of different styles of jars for preserving or ‘canning’ vegetables. Although expensive new, we have found many crates of them at garage sales and op shops for a fraction of the price – just make sure you can still get the rings and lids for whichever ones you get. We use Fowlers brand jars as the parts are available new if you need them. To use these jars you fill to about an inch from the top, and slip over a rubber seal, the lid and a clip to hold it down. Before we got jars we used long neck beer bottles with crown caps from a homebrew store, and you can save and reuse any jars or bottles as long as they have good metal lids.

When full put all of your jars in a big stock pot and add water to just below the lids and slowly bring to a low boil. I boil the jars for an hour, then let them cool slowly in the hot water to be on the safe side.

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Here’s how the seal should sit on the jar – these are a bit fiddly to get on but you soon get the hang of flicking the twists with your thumb to straighten them up.

If you have a dedicated ‘Vacola’ pot for boiling the jars, it has a raised platform in the bottom so that the jars aren’t right on the hot bottom of the pot. If you’re using a stock pot, bring to the heat slowly or the jars can crack – either from the heat or bubbles jittering them around. I’ve seen people put rags or tea towels on the bottom to stop this happening.

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Another batch of sauce ready to boil.

If you’ve been making sauce all day and need a quick meal, take a ladle full of your fresh sauce, grind in a little salt and pepper, cook up whatever pasta you have lying around – thick shapes like spirals work well but anything goes and hit it with the sauce. Grate a little parmesan on top if you have it. Might not look like much but the clean flavours and textures are so good.

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More:

Mouli on Amazon (or try second hand shops) – this is a good, cheap option for making smaller batches of sauce.

The Squeezo – I covet this after reading eatatdixiebelles post about it

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You Need A Tomato Press

Our family has been growing a large patch of tomatoes for a few years now, and bottling our own tomato sauce for pizza sauce, pasta, and everything else. When you are processing a large quantity of tomatoes you quickly realise that pressig them through a sieve, or even using a food mill, is going to take an awful long time.

We got around this problem by ‘borrowing’ a tomato press from a relly – I say ‘borrow’ because they haven’t asked for it back yet, and it’s far too useful to get rid of it unless we have to!

This machine is a pretty simple design, consisting of a large suction cap mounted base (very useful, pasta machine manufacturers please take note) with a funnel for the tomatoes, a tray to catch the pulp, and a spring loaded handle.

It all hinges on the white part of the handle that you can see, which sits under the funnel. There are two small spring loaded paddles protruding from the side, and these press the tomatoes against a wire screen which is just fine enough that seeds and skin slide past while the pulp and juice pass through. Here’s the tomato mill in all it’s glory (excuse the photo) together with a shot of the inside with the handle/scraper mounted:

To start processing tomatoes, you just briefly simmer them in boiling water to loosen the skins, and start dropping them into the funnel. It’s not a bad idea to cut larger tomatoes in half once they have been simmered, but mind your fingers – they are hot. Alternatively, squish them down into the machine with the handle of a wooden spoon as you go. A word of warning – remove any protruding stems as they will block the machine up.

Here’s the tomato strainer in action, you can see a bunch of skins being pushed out the side and lovely tomato sauce being produced. Don’t throw the skins out straight away though – I have found a good quantity of extra tomato pulp can be produced by running the skins through the machine a second or even third time. My one criticism, at least with the machine we have, there is a bowl supplied to catch the pulp but nothing to catch the skins. You can manage with any bowl though.

When you are finished, the whole thing comes apart neatly to clean up (and it will be messy). Make sure to pull apart the I-shaped plastic blades, as sauce gathers in between them.

The good news is that a tomato machine like this one can be found cheaply online, Amazon have the exact model here for under $50 last time I checked. I highly recommend a similar version if you’re planning on processing any amount of tomatoes.