canning...

I make a lot of food with tomato sauce and have been canning tomatoes for several years – usually a job for the Labour Day weekend but I’m early this year because we went to Metro the other day and they had the 25-pound boxes of Roma tomatoes for sale – fairly cheap at $8 per box. I thought I’d write down what I do and maybe brag a bit about an outstanding piece of equipment I have!
I used to have an old food mill that was rather lame, seemed to be messy and a real pain and mostly just ground everything up. A few years ago, my daughter let me use this ‘tomatopress’ that she had – a friend had brought it from Italy for her and it’s good. It locks onto your flat surface, you load the hopper on top, place a bowl behind to catch the juice and pulp and then there is a chute at the side that spits out the seeds and skin and anything that won’t go through the fine sieve and you just turn the handle and watch it work. I was lucky enough to spot the exact one at Williams-Sonoma last year and I love it – I also use it for applesauce and mixed fruit compote.
My old method of doing tomato sauce was a two to three-day process – score the top stem of the tomatoes, throw them in boiling water to loosen the skins, put them through the food mill and then boil everything down to get a nice thick sauce. One time last year I had only a partial box and I decided to try roasting the tomatoes instead of boiling. WOW! What a difference, both in labour and in flavour!
This is my new method. Wash and clean the tomatoes. Set the oven to 400F convection with one rack on the bottom and one in the middle/high. Load the tomatoes in the broiler pan or whatever you have that has a bit higher sides – a cookie sheet isn’t deep enough. Do two trays at a time for one hour, rotating them half way through. Notice the little bit of char on the skins – that just adds to the flavour. After the hour, you will have nice soft cooked tomatoes and a fair amount of concentrated juice. Put through the food mill (I go three times to make sure you’re getting everything), dump results into a large pot to simmer away until all tomatoes are done. I don’t add anything – no salt, no sugar, no garlic, nothing, just a half teaspoon of fresh lemon juice to the top of each jar before putting the lids on (and then doing the water bath thing for 20 minutes). This way I can give them a as a gift to anyone regardless of their dietary restriction and they can use it however they want.

I ended up with 20 - 500ml/2-cup jars and got it all done by myself, no sweat in less than 8 hours total and didn’t have to worry about stirring and simmering and not burning anything!