Tomato harvest time
With Spokane’s short growing season, normally easy-to-grow tomatoes are not necessarily a slam dunk. While we have no pest problems, and Montana built a terrific cattle panel trellis to support them this year, the weather is so unpredictable. This year’s May and June were COLD - we didn’t remove our electric blanket until the end of June! Those poor baby tomato plants went in the coldest, wettest, windiest garden. I really should have just let them stay in pots in the garage for another 6 weeks. Many didn’t make it and were replaced with some nice, healthy plants from our local market in June.
But eventually the warm weather always finds us up here, and our tomatoes have been doing terrific thanks to Steve’s irrigation masterpiece. And there are a LOT of them (it’s a 40’ row!). The worry now is whether we will keep having enough sunny days to ripen the rest of the fruit before the first frost.
So we did our first harvest this week, a literal laundry basket full of red and orange goodness. We were able to turn about 2/3s of what we picked into tomato sauce for the freezers. In prior years we have gone through the rather painful process of blanching, peeling, and milling out all of the seeds before processing tomatoes. It’s quite an ordeal. After some research I determined that all of that extra up-front work is not worth it. Here is what we did this year - super simple!
It took two of us to carry the laundry basket used to harvest this haul!
So many different varieties - all different shapes, sizes, and colors. Next year we might be a little more intentional about which varieties we grow.
Easy processing step 1: Wash and remove the stem area (give those to the chickens!) and roughly quarter the fruit and then food process it for a minute or so until it is smooth. As I mentioned above, no need to remove those skins or seeds.
Step 2: The pureed pulp goes right into the roaster oven, where it will cook down for as many hours as we can give it. Note in the background, Montana and I had to take a Bartesian break for some refreshing cocktails between all of that chopping and food processing.
After filling the roaster oven we still had this many picked tomatoes that will have to wait until later to be processed.
The sauce cooks down to about half its size, and then we add a little salt and use Montana's immersion blender to further smooth things out. You can see in this picture that there are still some seeds that don't get fully pulverized by this process. So I suppose if you have a recipe (or an eater) that absolutely requires ZERO seeds, you could run this through a quick food mill to remove them. But the skins all break down 100%, no problem there.
Step 3: Freeze it. Supplies needed: Freezer bags, handy bag holder, cup or ladle to fill, and straw to remove the air bubbles before sealing.
15 quarts of perfect tomato sauce ready for the freezers, all from our little garden bed, yum! We will be repeating this exercise several more times over the next month or as long as the frost holds off!
