The Big Tomato Payoff

Heirloom Tomatoes-Bird Back 40

Break it Down! Stop! Tomato Time!

Is your garden like mine? Heirloom tomatoes coming out of your ears? It is that time of year for us heirloom aficionados. Long after the hybrids have played out and stopped producing, the heirlooms move in and take over -- delivering harvest after harvest after harvest.

And if the weather holds? Yet another harvest!

What does one do when nature delivers a boatload of heirloom tomato goodness? A couple like yours truly and the wife that is Venus drags out the canning equipment and starts preparing for some very big canning projects. We can't eat 50 tomatoes in one or two sittings. But we'll make darn sure that each one of them finds it's way into a canning jar of whole tomatoes, tomato sauces or salsa.

First Steps: Wash and Core Tomatoes

There's nothing quite like a warm bite of salsa on a Monday Night Football game played in a snowstorm. That's the payoff, my friends, the big tomato payoff.

This most recent project pays homage to a home-canning professional by the name of Sharon Howard, who plied her trade during decades of gardening in the Alberta, Canada area. I first became aware of Sharon many moons ago when I grabbed one of her recipes for canning dill pickles. She was kind enough to share many tomato sauce and stewed tomato canning recipes that were decades old, resulting in some of the most ridiculously delicious sauces we have ever created.

But on this particular day last August -- the job facing us was fairly simple. My back had healed up to the point where I could actually bend and pick a bounty of a harvest without a nerve or a disc flying off the handle and into the next backyard. The job on this day would be placing as many whole tomatoes into one-quart canning jars and processing the haul through a pressure canning process.

Skinned Tomatoes

The most tedious part of this process would be removing the skins from the actual tomatoes. That's job I leave up to the wife that is Venus. My job is to boil said tomatoes first, in a pot of water. Then place those tomatoes I've stuck in boiling water for one minute into an ice water bath.

With perfect red, round and smooth tomatoes -- those skins will slip off quite easily. But heirloom tomatoes aren't red. They aren't round either. And they are anything but smooth. Heirloom tomatoes are rather unwieldy, cat-faced beasts. It makes the job of peeling off the skins a little tougher, but it's still well worth the effort when those cold winter months roll into town.

Pack Each Jar Full!

As you might be able to guess, this process takes a little time with 50-100 freshly harvested tomatoes. But as we've come to learn in previous years, anything less than 20 one-quart jars of whole tomatoes is going to leave us short when we need them. And I cannot tell you how much I detest the assignment of driving to the store (in cold weather no less) to pick up a can or two of whole or sliced tomatoes.

And do you think our sauces are going to taste as good with something that came out of a common cannery? Perish the thought! Yep -- we're spoiled alright. Mighty spoiled. But it's also spoiled in a good way.

Summer Goodness in a Jar

After the skins are off -- the task gets fairly simple. Once those one-quart jars are washed and sterilized through the boiling water bath process, it's time to add a tablespoon or two of processed lemon juice to each jar, cram them with as many peeled tomatoes as possible, wipe the rims of each jar, seal and process through a 30-minute pressure canning process.

Then end result on this day? 18 quarts of whole tomatoes. Add those 18 quarts to five others that we had put through the canning process earlier this summer, and the Bird household is stocked with whole tomatoes for winter use.

Under Pressure

Ah -- but that's just part of the canning process. Because you can't make a tomato-good pizza sauce without adding a little finished tomato SAUCE to those whole tomatoes. Know what that means? It means another harvest is three weeks off.

You think sauce is important? Well, don't ask me! Rob Schneider of Saturday Night Live fame made sauce famous with his signature lines from skit involving a restaurant called "Hub's Gyros: "You like a de sauce, eh? De sauce is good, eh? I get you more sauce!" Three simple lines. Non-stop laughter.

Simple instructions for canning whole tomatoes can be found here and here.

One Tomato, Two Tomato, Oh Lord!

Who Put These in my Sink?

And so it begins. It's that daily ritual when the summer garden that you've worked so hard to plant and nurture finally begins to pay off with....More work.

WTF? Who signed me up for this?

It's that time in the summer when every green tomato plant is showing several different shades of summer color. When you start to notice big rigs on the highway loaded down with paste tomatoes headed to the nearest cannery, you know that treasured season has arrived at last. Heirloom tomato season is here.

Oh, Dear Lord...

It announced itself with a proverbial bang this past weekend. Both the wife that is Venus and I knew that we would probably be required to do a bit of early-season canning based upon the ripe tomatoes we could spot growing near the base of each plant.

But when we discovered that those one or two ripened tomatoes held a treasure trove of five to six or ten more? We knew we were in for a job. When just the chore of harvesting leaves you grasping for the nearest bottle of cold water and perhaps a little relief from a fan lined up in front of the air conditioner, you've got a job on your hands.

And what a job it was.

The Lush Queen Tomato

Venus and I had been expecting to can about seven to ten quarts of whole tomatoes when we first surveyed the garden that Saturday morning. We badly underestimated. Twenty quarts wasn't going to hold what we took from the garden that morning -- and the tomatoes just continue to ripen at a rather maddening pace.

So this is what overload means.

Venus and I normally can a variety of heirloom tomato dish options during our home-canning adventures. There's the famous and always-in-demand Roasted Garlic, Pepper and Heirloom Tomato Salsa and the equally scrumptious Herbed Tomato Sauce.

Venus Peels Skins Off Whole Tomatoes

But we had a problem. The tomatoes came a little earlier than normal this year. I'm not sure if it's that spell of 100-degree heat that caused the early ripening, or the pains we took at plant out last April. Whatever it was, it spelled a boatload of tomatoes and the kind of harvest one would expect in mid-August -- not July.

Since the peppers weren't quite ready for large scale harvest just yet -- and salsa depends wide varieties and numbers of peppers -- salsa was out. As for the Herbed Tomato Sauce? We still have a jar or two of that stuff leftover from last year's harvest. Why make more?

Skins Off! Time for Canning!

But whole tomatoes? We use that stuff all the time and ran through the last quart from last year's harvest back in March. And so? The project for this day? Can whole tomatoes for winter. Because there's nothing quite like popping open a can of home-canned, vine-ripened tomatoes from your own garden during the dead of winter. It springs the smell of a summer garden into your kitchen -- which is nice -- because the calendar says December and it's damn cold outside.

Canning whole tomatoes also happens to be one of the easier home canning projects. Simply wash the fruit, remove the cores, peel the skins, stick them in jars, add a tablespoon of bottled lemon juice or two plus a dab of salt and you're day is done after you process the completed haul in a pressure or water-bath canner. Some growers even prefer to leave the skins on. More power to them. That's one less step for us to take.

Whole Tomatoes? Or Monster Brains???

Jars of home-canned tomatoes look positively funky because the water inside the fruit tends to separate during the canning process. No matter how many tomatoes one jam packs into that one-quart jar -- it's going to come out half tomatoes and half water -- tomatoes at the top and tomato liquid at the bottom.

Yes -- you're right -- it does look a little like something out of Frankenstein's monster. But it's one dish that Baron Victor von Frankenstein would approve of.

Even mad scientists gotta eat sometime. Think about it!