Canning Tomatoes and Sauce

What a terrific day I had canning with my friends Sooz Diedrich and Kristy Harrison!!!  This was my first time canning so I learned a lot.



Sooz Diedrich, Me, and Kristy Harrison



The first day we used Kristy's squezoo machine to turn 70 of our 90 pounds of tomatoes into juice.  The remaining 20 pounds we left out to can whole.

The Squeezo Machine turning tomatoes to juice

To can whole tomatoes, you first steam them whole until they split.  Next dip them in cold water and remove the skins.  From there you stuff the jars full and then add a bit of water to the bottom lip of the jar.  We pressure cooked them for about 10 minutes (Kristy is really the expert here, I'm just paraphrasing what went down).

Here's the whole tomatoes in the pressure cooker while we are cooking down the sauce.

Canning whole tomatoes and boiling down sauce

Here's the recipe we used for the tomato sauce which we plan to use for chili, lasagna, etc.

70 pounds of tomatoes turned into juice
10 cups of onion
20 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup of salt
2 T of sugar (we added more later)
4 cups of chopped basil

We boiled this down for 5 hours until it thickened up. 

When it thickened up we ladled the sauce into the jars, we capped and then added used a pressure canner for about 15 - 20 minutes. 

Sauce

And in the end, we were left with beautiful jars of tomatoes and sauce.  Not to mention some great memories of a day and a half spent with some great friends. 

Tomatoes and Sauce

Thanks for reading my blog.  I'm off to my favorite place - LAMBEAU!!
Kristin