Description
Flash Freeze your excess summer tomatoes to cook or can later.
Ingredients
Tomatoes!! Any kind and as many or as few as you have at the moment.
Instructions
- First step is to gently wash the tomatoes and remove the stems. I don’t core them, because I’m going to run them through my food mill (affiliate link) later when it’s time to make sauce.
- Once rinsed, I pack them into a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Then I place the sheet pan of fresh tomatoes into the freezer for at least 24 hours.
- I mix all my tomatoes together. I don’t separate by variety. Here you see Romas, Mushroom basket, and Genovese tomatoes. Like I said, I grow several varieties
- Placing the fruit on a tray and freezing like this is called Flash Freezing.
- After an over night rest, I pull the frozen tomatoes from the freezer, and place them into 2 gallon sized freezer bags. (affiliate link) Then I put those freezer bags into my deep freeze in the garage.
- When I have several bags of frozen tomatoes, I will weigh them on a scale in my garage. Generally, once I have 30 or 40 pounds worth of frozen tomatoes, I’m ready to start canning them.
Notes
To learn more about properly freezing and using fresh produce, I recommend the book Freeze Fresh by Crystal Schmidt. (affiliate link) Very informative and wonderful recipes with beautiful photography.