In episode 001 Kathy is talking about canning tomatoes. She reviews the equipment, the ingredients and provides step by step instructions for successfully canning tomatoes.
Play the episode
The complete recipe for How to Can Tomatoes can be found here.
Recipes using canned tomatoes include:
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why canning tomatoes is perfect for the novice canner and the experienced canner
- Some ways to use canned tomatoes
- The equipment you'll need for water bath canning tomatoes
- Steps to make canned tomatoes
- Why it's important to use canning salt
- Why using bottle lemon juice is necessary
- How to prevent syphoning
- How to check your jars to make certain a seal has formed
Where to listen to the podcast
Listen to this episode on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Podcast, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.
Resources
- Canning jars
- Jar lifter and canning tools
- Canning pot
- National Center for Home Preservation of Food
Transcript
Welcome to preserving the pantry where I talk about everything related to food preserving. I am your host, Kathy Berget.
Hi, and welcome to episode one of preserving the pantry. I'm Kathy, your host. And today we're gonna be talking about canning tomatoes. Now this recipe and its entirety, all the tips and everything you need to know can be found on my blog, beyond the chicken coop, go to beyond the chicken coop.com and search for how to can tomatoes for that complete recipe.
I will also include a direct link into the show notes of. Podcast today. I picked this as my very first recipe to share with you for a couple of different reasons. One is if you are a beginning canner, it's a really easy recipe to begin canning with. There's not a lot of ingredients. The steps are pretty cut and dry, and it's a great way to get started.
The second is if you are an experienced canner, this is a recipe that's very practical that you're going to find you come back to again and again. If you have a garden and a lot of tomatoes, this is a great way to preserve those tomatoes so that you can use them year round. They store easily in your pantry, and you just grab a jar when you're ready for dinner, or when you're ready to start cooking.
And you add them into any recipes like soups, chili, marinara sauce. However you use canned tomatoes. Some of the equipment that you will need for this recipe for canning tomatoes, you'll need canning jars. You can use pint size, jars, or quart size jars. We typically use quart jars for this because that's the amount that I will typically add to a recipe.
Think about how you're going to be using your tomatoes, and that's the jars size that you should select. You can use regular mouth, regular mouth jars, or wide mouth. Really depends on what you have available. You'll need the rings and new lids. You'll also need a pot, a canning pot. Any pot will work as long as it's large enough for your canning jars to fit in the, in the pot.
And it has to be some space when covered completely covered by water. And by at least one inch, you'll want a lid on that. And also think about when the water comes to a boil. You wanna make sure that the water's not over boiling. You do need rack on the bottom of your pot. You are going to want a jar lifter. That's for putting the jars into the water bath canner, and especially for taking them out of the water bath canner, you'll also want a debubbler.
Now you can buy a debubbler in your in the canning supply area. Or I often use a plastic knife that like what you would take on a picnic, a disposable plastic knife, and you can also use a small rubber spatula. Do not use anything metal for when you go to remove your bubble.
The ingredients, you do want very fresh tomatoes. If they're from your garden, make sure they're nice and ripe, and you wanna make sure that they're not spoiled or bruised or anything like that. If you're buying them, make sure that you're buying them from a local farmer's market or garden.
You want the very best tomatoes that you can find you need bottled lemon juice for this recipe and bottled lemon juice is really the key because we're adding lemon juice to increase the acidity of the tomatoes and bottled lemon juice has a very consistent acidity level.
Fresh squeeze lemon juice can actually vary in the acidity level. So you do not want to use that in this recipe. You're also going to add salt. Now salt is optional, so you can add it or, or not. It's totally up to you.
If you are adding salt, make sure you're using canning salt and not table salt. Canning salt is made without any additional additives. If you're using table salt, it will often create a very cloudy looking broth and juice.
So now into the steps for canning tomatoes. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to be peeling your tomatoes, and this is gonna be done by blanching them first in hot water, submerging them into ice water, and then peeling that peel off.
You're also going to be cutting the core out of the tomatoes and then chopping these tomatoes into quarters or eights, whatever size pieces you want depends on the size of your tomatoes to. Very large tomatoes I have to cut up into smaller or excuse me, into more chunks so that they're consistent in pieces.
You'll add the lemon juice to each of your jars, and then put your cut tomatoes into the jars. You'll want to make sure that you leave at least a half inch head space from the top of the jar with your tomatoes. If you're adding salt, you'll add it at this time. And then you're going to add boiling water over, over the tomatoes again, leaving ¼ inch head space.
Next you'll be removing the air bubbles. I like to give the jars a gentle tap on the, on the counter, just to help remove some of those air bubbles. And then you'll take your de bubbler just to kind of swirl around the outside of the jar. And that just helps stir up those tomatoes a little bit.
If there's any little air bubbles trapped in there, you'll see them come up to the surface. Wipe down the rim of your jar. Put on a clean lid and ring and tighten that ring. Now you don't want to over tighten when you're putting a ring onto the jar. You just want to finger tighten it. So it's nice and snug, but you don't have to use, you know, your Superman muscles to get that really tight. It's not needed. You just give a good snug grip onto that and get it tight.
So put your filled jars into the water bath canner with a submarine water. If you need to add. Additional water onto, into your pot. You'll do it at this time. Remember you want at least one inch over the top of your jars with the water, put the lid on and turn that heat up and get it to a boil.
Now, once your water comes to a full rolling boil, that's where you're going to start your timer. Time that's going to be needed for boiling and processing. The tomatoes will vary depending on your elevation and make sure you check that elevation chart to know exactly how much additional time you need to add to your tomatoes.
The time for pints will be processing in that boiling water for 40 minutes. And quarts are for 45 minutes. Again, you'll need to check your elevation chart. I am just, I'm located just above 2000 feet in elevation. So I have to, add an additional five minutes to my boiling time again, make sure you check that chart.
It's available on my my website. Once your time is up. Turn off the heat, remove the lid and let your jars sit without disturbing them in the hot water for five to 10 minutes, this helps prevent siphoning of the juice or the liquids from your jars, and then use your jar lifter and place them on a cooling rack. I use like a cookie rack that I put it on.
I always put a towel underneath that cookie rack. Then the on directly on top of the counter, put the cookie rack on top of that and then put my jars on. Now probably the hardest part about canning is this next stage. And it's the waiting stage before I touch the jars. You'll right away start to hear the pinging of the jars as those lids start to seal.
And the hardest part here is not touching the lid to see if it's actually sealed. You don't want to touch these jars until they're absolutely totally cooled, which is anywhere between 12 and 24 hours. Isn't that tough? I told you. It's the hardest part. My husband just wants to reach out and touch those.
Don't do it. Let those jars fully cool. Don't tighten the rings. A lot of times they'll feel really loose when it first comes out and you don't wanna touch 'em or tighten them. Everything's gonna be just fine. After your, the jars are fully cool at a good 12 hours, you can then test to see if the jars have sealed to do this.
You just touch the top of the lid. If there's no indentation or up and down movement, the jar is sealed. You'll also want to take the li the rings off. See, make sure that that, that lid is really snug on there. You'll want to wash your jars off and get any extra residue off of them, and then dry them. You'll want to label with what the contents are and the date you can put the rings back on or leave the rings off for storage, and you're going store them in your pantry.
I can't wait for you to enjoy them. Make sure you join me for the next episode where we're gonna be talking about two methods for preserving wild, morel mushrooms. I can't wait.
Thanks for listening and be sure to tune in again next week for more episodes of preserving the pantry.
If you make this recipe, I’d love to hear about it! Leave a comment below and snap a picture and tag me on Instagram @beyondthechickencoop or @preservingthepantry
Leave a Reply