Tomatoes for the year ahead

For many years we’ve been preserving the tomato harvests from Our Tiny Farm using the Fowler’s method. So fun at the time and later rewarding to pop open a jar of home made passata. But there are limits to the productive capabilities of our little space… and with the increase in small hands that both pick and eat our tomatoes, last year we decided to buy in some boxes of roma tomatoes.

The 60 odd kilos we bottled up last year got us through until about October so this year, we upped our purchase to 80kg – 4 boxes and devoted two days to turning half into passata, and half into whole peeled tomatoes.

DAY ONE – Passata making

Our equipment is pretty basic – a hand wound moule that got an upgrade this year with the retrieval of a cast-off piece of home brew equipment we found on the nature strip. It was the perfect size to prop the moule on to provide stability without getting full too quickly.

We’d been collecting our used passata jars since we ran out last year so – fingers crossed – our 40 odd jars will be enough. They’ve all been washed and we bought a bag of new Italian lids from the tomato man to hopefully guard against spoiling which sometimes happens with reused lids.

We start by double washing the tomatoes – our huge double sinks come in really handy for this. We cut off the top and any damaged or funky looking bits and pile them into tubs ready for cooking.

Using the largest pot we have, we add a heap of tomatoes to rapidly boiling water, put the lid back on and continue boiling for 10 minutes. Some people might thing this is overcoooking but it does allow for easier processing through the moule if the tomatoes are really soft to begin with. You just need to be careful that tomatoes don’t explode as you’re pressing them – after a could of scalds, we started stabbing each tomato as it went into the press to relieve the pressure of the moule.

We pop the ladles of tomatoes in the moule and work at them until they reach the satisfying smooth feeling where you’ve got rid of all the pulp and are just working the skins. Every few loads, we’d clean the skins from the moule to keep it moving

Once there is enough pulped tomato in the container, it’s time to fill the jars! Each jar gets one big basil leaf from the garden and a 1/4 tsp of citric acid. Not everyone uses citric acid because tomatoes are naturally quite acidic but personally I’d rather be botulism-free than stingy about the citric acid.

The second hand brew container has a release at the bottom but our passata was too chunky to fit through it so we’ll have to see if we can drill it out a bit next year. For this round, we used old fashioned funnels and a ladle. It works.

Most of our preserving is done in our Fowler’s electric preserving kit. It’s really easy to use and very reliable. The only downside is that we could only do 8 jars at a time so it took 5 runs through to get through our 40 jars. And given each run takes an hour, that was a lot of hours just on processing.

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And voila! The finished jars ready for storage!

DAY TWO – whole peeled tomatoes

For the whole peeled tomatoes, we used an assortment of fowlers no 20 bottles and whatever jars we’ve been able to squirrel away over time. These jars didn’t get new lids so hopefully they last ok.

The lids all get a bath in a liquid to sterilise them, even though the processing in the Fowler’s unit does the sterilising for us.

For whole peeled tomatoes, they are again double washed and then the tops cut off and this time, the bottoms are also scored with a little cross. We find that this helps the skins to slip off more easily.

Similar to making passata, the prepared tomatoes are slipped into boiling water but in this case, only for 2 minutes. To keep the water hot, we boil much smaller batches.

After boiling, the tomatoes are plunged into a sink full of fresh cold water and then individually handled to remove the skins and slide them into the jars. Two minutes seems to be the perfect time to ensure the skins come off easily but without the flesh getting too hot to handle, or too soft so as it falls apart.

We jam the jars as full of tomatoes as we can then top with citric acid and fill with water (if necessary) to make sure everything is covered, but that there is still enough head room in the jar (about 1.5cm).

A couple of jars didn’t seal properly so we’ve thrown them in the freezer instead.

It seems a shame that we don’t have the big community sauce making days that we’ve seen many in the Italian community hold but our equipment really wouldn’t cope with too many more tomatoes. But who knows… maybe we’ll upgrade and create our own passata community next year.