Yesterday I had my largest batch of pasta sauce yet - 7 full quarts, enough to fill my canner. This was made from a big batch of red tomatoes - enough to fill my sink (I'll post photos later). The tomatoes were mainly Super Sauce, with some Mortgage Lifter and Airyleafs. The Super Sauce were really great. A few came close to 16 oz. - really huge plum shaped, red fruits.
In total I have about 25 quarts canned so far, and I believe we are just past the biggest harvesting time.
I noted that the Green Zebras and Indigo Rose were the last to ripen. However I think they went in the ground last, so there you go.
For the canned quarts I have the following items. The pasta sauces are all basically made with homegrown basil, garlic, salt, sugar, maybe onion, oregano, and maybe a bit of "italian seasoning" and a sprinkle of red pepper (not too much).
•A few jars of "orange sauce" made from yellow tomatoes (Kbs , Orange Slicers and a few Flammes). From blanched/peeled/pureed/filtered tomatoes. Lotsa basil, which after cooking seemed to darken the yellow sauce to an orange-red color (still much more orange then normal pasta sauce).
•A few jars initially of "dark red" sauce, mainly BFT + Cherokee Purples + Mortage Lifters, and some Costolutos. From blanched/peeled/pureed/filtered tomatoes.
•A few more jars of red sauce, mainly from MLs. This time I did not blanch and peel them - just pureed them with the skins on, after cutting out the cores and bad parts of course. I decided it was too much time and work to do all the blanching and peeling.
•The 7 jars noted above of red sauce from SS, ML and Airyleafs. For this batch I pureed what I estimate to be ~10-12 quarts of liquid tomato puree to begin with (after filtering out seeds and pulp with a colander). This was boiled down to the 7 quarts, then I enlisted the help of a neighbor who let the sauce simmer with the garlic, basil etc. all day long till I could can it that evening. I was really happy how that went - especially when the final volume was almost exactly 7 quarts, perfectly filling the canner - couldn't have planned it better if I tried.
• And, a few jars of blanched and peeled, whole/halved/ quartered tomatoes. 2 quarts of black cherry tomatoes, which is nice because it's a bit different. Several jars of the yellow tomatoes. Here I started to notice some jars had a bunch of water (like ~1/3 the jar volume, with floating tomatoes on top) separating in the jars after canning. Those are nicely yellow.
• The weirdest jar was made from pureed Costolutos After initially being dissapointed with the first few of these tomatoes, due to a fair number with end rot, I warmed up to them as more good ones started coming in: they are the deepest red of all the varieties I've had, and with the ribbing they just look really fantastic on the plate. So the puree from these is a really great red color. After canning one quart of puree, it separated out to have a floating layer of solids, a watery layer and a sunken layer of solids. Weird, but eventually when cooked and reduced it should make a fine base for a single small pot of sauce.
No comments:
Post a Comment