Putting Up Tomato Sauce

Lots of tomatoes have been coming in.  They fill the island and the refrigerator and they are piling up.  We pick them about a day early and let them finish ripening indoors, but pretty soon we have piles of tomatoes.  What to do?

The fastest way we've found to make a bunch of tomatoes disappear is to make tomato sauce.  We blanch the tomatoes, core them, remove the skins and slice them up.  Then we clean our jars, lids, and rings, leaving in warm water until we're ready to fill them.  We put a tablespoon of lemon juice along with a 1/2 teaspoon full of salt in each jar.

We throw the sliced tomatoes immediately into a pot and allow the chopped tomatoes to reduce.  A lot of the water will evaporate in the form of steam, leaving a flavorful tomato sauce.

We use an immersion blender to chop up any remaining pieces of tomato.  Some people remove the seeds, but we just leave the seeds in the sauce and continue cooking while the sauce continues to reduce and concentrate.

When the tomato sauce gets to the consistency you like, remove it from the burner.  It will be a nice, deep-red color.

Using a canning funnel we fill the jars.

We clean up the rims and then affix the lid and ring to each jar.

In the meantime, we have 3 quarts of water and a tablespoon of vinegar heating up in the pressure canner.  We load the pressure canner up with jars.

We put the lid on and wait until steam starts coming out.  After it has been steaming for 10 minutes, we put the 10 pound pressure regulator on the top of the canner.  When the regulator begins to rock, we time it for 15 minutes.  At the end of 15 minutes, we pull the canner off of the fire and allow its pressure to drop on its own.

We continue to make tomato sauce for use throughout the year.  So far we have several gallons made with more to come.  I'll show you something else cool we do with tomatoes next week.