A Tale of Tomatoes: From Seed to Salsa in 6+ Months

The day after Thanksgiving I was having kitchen withdrawal symptoms so I decided to spend part of Black Friday making and canning green tomato salsa. The day-long effort was actually the culmination of a six-month experiment in gardening inefficiency. And like a high-school chemistry experiment, I'm writing up the project from memory, about a half-hour before the lab is due.

Tomatoes having the reputation for being fast growers and prolific producers.  Not over a hot Texas summer. Apparently the nighttime temperatures have to get below 75 in order for fruit to set.  Austin seems to have the right combination of heat + humidity to prevent this from happening.  Maybe it's just the type of tomatoes I'm trying to grow.  Perhaps I can try others.  But it's been 2 years of trying and I've gotten bumpkin.

Last year I got disgusted looking at my scrawly tomato plants about September and ripped them out. Then someone told me that if I leave the plants in until it gets cool again (end of September/beginning of October), I'll have tons of tomatoes.  So that what I did this year.

Here's the bounty of tomatoes, all 6.3 pounds of themf

First try at pressure canning

So I bought a pressure canner last Fall but hadn't had the gumption to use it until this past weekend.  I had cooked a stewing chicken bought from a local farm and decided to make and can some chicken broth.  The flavor for the broth was loosely based off of a recipe by Hutson's Herb Garden cookbook (she's the author that introduced 'salad burnet' to our gin & tonic repertoire.)

The broth isn't the most perfect broth/stock I've ever had, but it's good enough to flavor rice cooking anyway.  The big leap of confidence came in canning the stock. First, the canner had to come out of the box.

Nice and shiny, isn't it? : )

So the next step is to take the broth that had been simmering with herbs and onions for about an hour and a half and strain it.  (That 's how it ended up in the glass bowl. )  Then, after cleaning the pint jars and resting them in hot water, we ladelled the broth into the canning jars, leaving about an inch of head space.

We were able to fill about 8 pints, but there was only room for 7 in the canner.  (The other went straight to the fridge.)

We filled the canner with 3 inches of water before putting in the jars, but then felt like the canner was too full. So we scooped some out so that the jars weren't completely covered.

Then we shut the canner and started it up.  I don't have any pictures of this process, because I was too nervous with that thing hissing and spitting on the stovetop to get the camera.  Dan took a video of it for a little bit, but I was too busy being crabby and worrying.  You see, this canner was different than the canner that I had seen in my canning class.  And it wasn't doing the thing I was sure (through word of mouth and reading) that a canner was supposed to do. It wasn't making a soothing 'rocking' or clicking sound.  The pressure weight was spinning furiously at first and then barely moving if we turned down heat.

Dan thought it pretty funny a the time.  I think it's funny now, but I couldn't see the humor then. That's a shame, 'cause having a live tiger spitting at you from your stove top is pretty dang funny.

But moving on.  We lasted through 20 tense minutes and then cut the heat. We let the canner cool for about 40 minutes until the safety lock allowed us to open the lid.  We move the jars to a wooden cutting board to cool.

The jars continued to boil for a while.  (Being under 10 psi for 20 minutes made the contents pretty hot.) I also noticed that the all the jars had a residue of some kind of salt/lime.  Probably because the water here in central Texas is a little on the hard side. Next time, I'll put a little vinegar in the canning water to see if that cuts this down some.

All the seals took and I now have 7 pints of broth in the pantry.  We made fish soup last night with the straight-to-refrigerator pint and it tasted alright, so I have hopes that these seven pints will be useful. I deemed this canning escapade a success. But let me also say, I understand why broth in the store is packaged in opaque boxes or cans.  Broth is not pretty in a jar.  But it's a useful pantry staple and it feels good to have made some from local fixings.

Pints of Pickled Peppers

I wanted to take a break from cheese-making failures, so I turned my sights on canning this weekend. Specifically, I am trying to preserve the bumper crop of hot and sweet peppers we've collected over the last few weeks from our farm box. Some of the jalapenos had already gone bad at the bottom of the veggie box, but we still had a cookie tray full of them. Too many to enjoy in omelets or salsas in the coming weeks.

Plus, ever since I bailed on canning the tomato sauce earlier this summer, I felt like a Generation X weeny. What would Mrs. Reynold's think?? So I was determined to try again before the season changed. Peppers seemed like another easy intro.

I tried 2 different recipes for pickling. One is a refrigerator recipe, so although the peppers are in jars, they'll be also kept at a safe temperature for storage. The second recipe was simpler, and is supposedly safe for storing jars at room temperature. But I have to admit, I have no confidence that I haven't just created a nursery for Clostridium botulinum. Anyway, I've got a few weeks before giving them a try. Maybe there's a botulinum home-test for home-canning?

Here's the recipe for the refrigerator recipe.
http://blog.ruhlman.com/ruhlmancom/2009/03/michael-symons-pickled-chillis.html

I had to use rosemary, because I didn't have marjoram handy. And I didn't have sherry vinegar, so I used rice vinegar. That one should be ready to try by Thanksgiving.

Here's the non-refrigerator recipe.
http://www.graspr.com/videos/Pickled-Peppers-1

The question is, how much do I trust Rita Heikenfeld and the fact that she said we didn't have to boil the peppers after canning? Is a 3 to 1 vinegar to sugar ratio acidic enough?

Well, there's time to worry about that in a few weeks or maybe in January. For now I have some kinda pretty experiments happening.

Thirty Pounds of Tomatoes

After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last month I was inspired to try canning my own tomato sauce. I bought 30 pounds of tomatoes from my CSA farm and planned a whole day to play in the kitchen. Not to spoil the story, but I have to say, things did not go smoothly. The best I can say is that lessons were learned, and there's something in the freezer that I'll eat in December or January and remember these 100+ degree days of summer....

My first goof was thinking that I had 40 pounds of tomatoes instead of 30. I didn't realize the misstep until much later in the day. Meanwhile, I froze 10 pounds of tomatoes whole. That left 20 pounds of tomatoes for cleaning, peeling, and seeding.

Here's what 20 pounds looks like:
And cleaning, peeling, and seeding takes much more time than you think. The novelty wore off a few hours into the day, but here's a picture when I was still giggly with the spirit of adventure:

So, my next miscalculation was the size of a pot you would need to create 10 quarts of tomato sauce. Fortunately, I was only dealing with 20 lbs instead of the 30 lbs called by the recipe. My biggest pot was only six quarts, and the amount of puree from 20 lbs was barely enough to fit:

Ah well. Sometimes the Universe just helps you out. At this point, I realized that my inexperience/ineptitude in the kitchen, mixed with the threat of botulism, were probably good enough reasons to go with freezing instead of canning. Plus, another benefit of freezing meant that I could throw in leftover veggies from the bottom of my icebox so they wouldn't go bad when I went on my week-long vacation. Problem(s) solved!

So, with my kitchen ship righted and my new course charted, I was ready to create some yummy Italian-style, ad hoc marinara. The reducing started early afternoon .... and took forever.

First, I was just trying to reduce it enough to get all the puree to fit in the pot, and then I remembered that I was supposed to be adding spices! So add them I did. I tried to act quickly to make up for lost time... and ended up adding the spices in the correct proportion to the 30 lb recipe, not the 20.

Well, by 9 at night I just decided to call it. The total quantity of sauce was about 4.5 quarts, about half that being spices. But what the heck. I figure I can always 'dilute' the sauce later with store-bought, canned tomato sauce.

(Yes, indeed. When Perfection went out the door, I had to throw Pride with it.)