Canning tomatos

At had my first attempt at canning tomatos today. We paid $5 for a box of roma tomatos and I had HEAPS in my pile. I wanted to do first some diced tomato to can instead of using store bought ones as these have sugar in them. Secondly, I am going to dry the rest in my dehydrator then pound them down to make tomato powder and use that instead of tomato paste. I think next month I will roast them in the oven and freeze it's just that this month the freezer is already full!!

I set up three bowls on the stove. The pot to the right has boiling water in it, the stainless steel bowl on the left cold water and the white pot on the left is my crockpot. I placed about 10 tomatos into the boiling water for a minute until I could see the skins starting to crack open. Then I scooped them out and placed them into the cold water to cool down. Straight away i placed another 10 into the hot water then proceeded to skin the ones sitting in the cold water and transferred them over to the crockpot whole. I worked quickly but without hurrying and it took about 5 min to do.


Then I cut the tops off as these still had some of the stem on them, sliced them in half, removed the seeds and chopped them up. This picture shows the aftermath! Next time I won't even bother removing the seeds.



I placed some frozen red capsicums in to give the tomotos some colour.


And placed the crockpot into position of the hot plate. I set it to high and left if for about 5 hours


Josh happily posing next to the crockpot and dehydrator.


I used the water bath method instead of a pressure canner because, well, I don't own one yet!



I decided to puree the whole thing to make it look like passata. To increase the acidity I added 1 tablespoon lemon juice to each jar.



I ended up with 5 and a half large jars in total (about 550mils each). Two didn't close properly so I place them in the fridge to be used shortly and the half filled on I didn't bother sealing.