Challenge: Canning Tomatoes

I feel like all I've been doing lately is canning fruits!  I started with some strawberry jam, moved on to whole blueberries, and earlier this week I canned diced tomatoes and white peaches.  I'll start by writing about my tomato experience and hold off on the peaches.  I'm sure my small readership is getting bored with all of this canning stuff!

Read back to my first canning post, the blueberries, for extra information on setting up the processing pot, etc.  I'm going to skip some of those steps here but you may need a refresher.

So, tomatoes.  Something I've wanted to can for a couple of years now.  My personal canning goal is to, at some point, can marinara sauce.  But that might be for next year.  I don't know if it's hard, but boiling down all of those tomatoes for hours on end is too much for me!

I decided that, since I use so many diced tomatoes over the winter in soups and casseroles, I would try dicing up the tomatoes in the recipe.  My go-to cookbook, Fannie Farmer, said I could leave the tomatoes whole or slice them so I guess it works both ways.

First things first, peel the tomatoes.  The easiest and fastest way to achieve a peeled tomato is to drop it in boiling water for a minute, dunk it in cold water for 30 seconds, and then simply make a small slice and pull off the skin.

Once you've got your tomatoes peeled, dice them up.  For every quart (four cups) of tomatoes I added a teaspoon of kosher salt.  The salt is in the directions from the cookbook but I imagine if you want a salt-free recipe it's possible.  I'd rather add the salt and make the canned tomatoes just a bit more inhospitable toward bacteria.  To make things simple I diced up a couple of tomatoes, put them in a large liquid measuring cup, then mixed in the salt with my hands.

Now you're ready to pack the tomatoes into jars and close them up.  Each jar should be filled with tomato pieces up to bottom ridge.  If there is juice in the mixture, pour that over the tomato pieces and press down with your fingers.  This helps remove air bubbles from the mixture and adds a bit of juice.  Make sure to leave a half inch of head space.

Hopefully your water bath is boiling and you're ready to cap 'em and process 'em.  Quickly dip the lids into the water bath to soften the plastic/rubber stuff and place them on the jars.  Screw on the rings just to finger-tightness.  Remember, do not put the rings on really tightly because you want any extra pressure or air to escape as you process the jars.  Fill up your rack with capped jars and lower it into the boiling water bath.  For pint size jars like mine process them for 35 minutes.

Voila!  Diced tomatoes!  I used nine tomatoes and made six pint jars.  I may try to make more.  The tomatoes are from the Kimball Fruit Farm stand at the Central Square farmer's market.  They are plain old field tomatoes but that stand seems to have the nicest selection heirloom varieties.