Comments on: How to Can Tomatoes

By: Sandra

Sandra — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:29:15 +0000

Help!
My tomatoes that were green,got ripe. So I made a spaghetti sauce. It was bitter!
I added sugar to the recipe, but that did not help. What didn’t I do, or what did I need to do. . . ?

By: What’s for Dinner Tonight? | Mark's Daily Apple

What’s for Dinner Tonight? | Mark's Daily Apple — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:00:32 +0000

[...] week we discussed the merits of canning your own foods. So you canned a bunch of tomatoes and now you need a good reason to use ‘em! Enter the following [...]

By: Uncle B

Uncle B — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:29:18 +0000

Pressure canning – the way to go! I pressure can everything I can get my hands on cheap! Supermarket got Chickens at half price to get rid of overstocking situation? In I go, and buy as many as I can get, prep them, can them, and when prices are high, I enjoy my half-priced stuff, no refrigeration costs added! Got an over-purchase of carrots two years ago for nearly nothing, canned them, gave carrot space in garden over to beets two years running now, and I am still laughing at the supermarket manager! See a veggie bargain in the fall and wish you could get those prices year-round? You can, You can! Seriously, I got salmon on a huge sale, canned the whole lot, and have great salmon whenever I want, much better than half-price, because to the fishmonger, it is a “perishable” but to me it is cannable! You do have to “get when the getting is good” and can fast and furious for a day or more every now and then, and you need a good supply of the reusable jars and new lids on hand, but you can really save a lot of money this way! We have a local farmer lets “poor folk” go over his tomato patch when he is done, for the smaller, misshapen, odd-ball tomatoes – we visit him every season and go canning crazy when we get home! Over the years, we have built up a good inventory of jars, from neighbors who gave up canning, yard sales, and folks who watch and collect such things just for us, so our “jar” costs are nothing. We use new lids every time, bought at the “Dollar Shop” or other bargain spots – Walmart had an end of season sale that did us a big favor last year!Lid costs can be kept minimal! Luckily we have a big old gas stove running on natural gas in our kitchen, and it serves as the cheap heat source for this endeavor. The rest is joyous labor of enthusiastically packing away secure food supplies for up to even three years ahead! and in these kind of times, that feels very good! I like drying food too, but that’s another story!

By: Hank Miller

Hank Miller — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:08:27 +0000

Holly,

Green eggs are made by chickens, NOT food coloring. If you want green eggs, you need to buy the right chickens. I recall my dad eating them at a relatives place when I was a kid. They only had a couple chickens that laid green eggs so I didn’t get to try them. (I don’t think they are any different other than the color of the shell)

By: Trinkwasser

Trinkwasser — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:57:22 +0000

OMG that takes me back to mother slaving away when I was little, only we used Kilner Jars

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilner_jar

Hmmm, if a freezer was pedal-powered would that be Primal?

By: Heather

Heather — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:19:55 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion to buy in bulk and can stuff, the thought never even occurred to me. I always associated having a garden with canning, like you had to grow it yourself in order to can it. Funny how the mind puts up walls and tells us there’s only one way to do things.

Now I can’t wait for the farmer’s market to open here, I’ll be buying a lot more than just what I can eat each week. I had actually given up tomatoes during the winter, figuring it was better to pay twice as much for local, organic tomatoes for a few months than waste money on crappy grocery store tomatoes all year long.

Thanks for showing us that it can be easy, canning always seemed like a daunting thing to undertake. Sometimes I make the dumbest things seem so hard when all it would take is reading the instructions…

By: Ellen

Ellen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:51:42 +0000

If you start canning fresh veggies, you are headed down a slippery slope! My family would only eat home-canned green beans, not store-bought! And home canned tomatoes are vastly superior to store bought. You can also freeze tomatoes after skinning & quartering. Good for soup.

By: Danielle T

Danielle T — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:29:31 +0000

This blog is always up my alley. I love this blog. I use a pressure cooker, then I don’t have to worry about adding vinegar or whatever to increase the acidity. With a pressure cooker you will be able to can soups and stews, which I think process pretty well. Refer to the Ball canning guides for details–great source of info. I was a big time tomato and pepper gardener when I lived in Chico, CA. I prefer to can salsa or plain tomato sauce rather than canning whole tomatoes; it’s just a more usable product for me. I have a juicer attachment for my kitchenaide mixer and it makes a beautiful puree out of tomatoes–this way you don’t have to deal with the skin blanching stuff and you can then cook it down and condense a lot of tomatoes into 8 or so jars. (I’m talking, HUNDREDS of homegrown tomatoes all ripe at once. I had tunnels I’d crawl through in that tomato garden!) Canning is not surgery–hands clean is always good in the kitchen but if the contents of the jars are brought to 240 degrees in a pressure cooker and kept there for a long time, it’s gonna nuke anything pretty much. And the stuff that can grow in low acid foods brought only to the boiling point is going to come from the food itself, not your hands, as far as I understand it. BTW apples can be quartered (not even cored) and boiled till soft then run through the juicer, too, then cooked down and canned as applesauce. I did that as baby food for my own, about 16 years ago. She still likes my homemade apple butter. Since I’m fructose intolerent, I can’t eat apples anymore. I’m going to try growing tomatoes again this year, though, after many years–a 20′ by 5′ raised bed is being erected in my yard and seedlings are being faithfully brought out to the front porch and then carried back in each night. It’s fun but I know Oregon will never yield me what I had in Chico, in terms of tomatoes. Heck in Chico those little seedlings would be in the ground, 10 inches tall by now! My husband will probably eat them all before I get a chance to can any of them!

By: Sonagi

Sonagi — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:03:41 +0000

Ugh, I can smell the tomatoes cooking in our family kitchen. I see the slimy little blobs in the bowl of goulash and on the Swiss steak. I was the least finicky of the kids, willing to eat anything except tomatoes, which my mother loved and served at least twice a week, and forced me to eat.

By: Mark Sisson

Mark Sisson — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:04:11 +0000

Welcome, Peggy.

Pickle away!

I look forward to hearing if and how you can perfect the Primal Energy Bar.

Thanks for the comment and stay in touch!