We got a hot tip from a good friend about some u-pick tomatoes and then end of season batch buys for some San Marzano tomatoes!
San Marzanos are the chef's choice sauce tomato and, from our own experience growing them in our backyard, we agree! So, we really couldn't turn down the opportunity to load up on them while they were at their peak of flavor. We ended up with 120 pounds, all told and cooked them down into a nice base for curries and pizza and pasta sauces.
This first picture is one batch of tomatoes (each batch was 20 pounds!), cut and ready for cooking...!
Canning equipment all set up. We have our water bath canner, the food mill, some cooked down tomatoes ready for the food mill, and a bowl for the skins and seeds.
These tomatoes were cooked down and are ready for the food mill which will separate out the bitter seeds and skins.
Since we just wanted a general tomato sauce base, we didn't add anything to the tomatoes while cooking them down although, if you want to make ready-made sauces, there are lots of recipes, including Barbara Kingsolver's Family Secret tomato sauce (pdf).
It takes a lot of cranking to get all of the seeds and skins removed.
We kept the solids for composting.
And, finally, the final product! We got about 16 quarts of sauce from all of the tomatoes (minus some we used on the fly in dinners made while we were in the process of canning)! It took 3 days to finish the canning...it was a lot of time and work, but worth it for the good tomato sauces we'll have during the off-season!!!
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