Canning Tomato Paste

We are woefully behind in updating our blog. I guess pregnancy, an unexpected basement renovation and an early harvest will do that. Regardless, tonight we canned tomato paste. Using the instructions on this link, we really enjoyed the making paste process.

http://www.pickyourown.org/canning_tomatopaste.htm

For our own records, we picked a crate full of tomatoes. We ran them through our Kitchen Aid Fruit/Vegetable Strainer which did the work of seeding, peeling and coring. What we were left with was pure tomato juice goodness.

Although the recipe calls for 8 qts of chopped, seeded tomatoes, we used 8 qts of our "juice". We did not add the bay leaves, salt or garlic because our intention for the paste is to use it as pizza sauce or spaghetti base, etc. and we wanted to control the flavor at the time of actual cooking.

We did the first reduction for 1 hour and then strained out the bell pepper chunks. We allowed it to simmer for the last 2 1/2 hours (give or take) in 2 pots to get a thick consistency.

We ended up with 6 1/2 pints of tomato paste. We would have loved to use really small jars but we just don't have many of those in our stash and ultimately will use large quantities of paste at a time.

It was still a long canning process, like anything. Being able to skip the blanching, peeling, trimming steps, however, was a real blessing. Our plan is to make any of UW tomatoes into paste in this fashion until the plants give up.