Marinara Mayhem

Yesterday started with a 25 pound box of roma tomatoes. I figured I would make two batches of marinara sauce, and then experiment and try to can the rest of them whole. First came the skinning. Few things can ruin a mouthful of sauce more than a beastly little roll-up of tough tomato skin that gets caught in your teeth. Luckily, all it takes is a huge pot of boiling water, a knife, and a willingness to have every cut on your hands sting like crazy.

naked, vulnerable tomatoes

Then I used my old recipe for sauce. It's simple....just tomatoes, carrots, onions, red wine, garlic, oregano, and basil. The carrots make the final product look a bit orange, but they do wonders for sweetening things up. I let that simmer for a few hours to thicken and then filled six quart jars. Two of them have a generous dose of red pepper flakes, so we'll see how that turns out over the long term. Hopefully it will be nice and spicy and not bitter.

a jar waiting for some whole tomatoes

The rest of the tomatoes got stewed briefly to soften them up a bit, and then they went straight into jars with a few fresh basil leaves. Then came the scary part. For the marinara, I just processed it in a hot water bath for a long time. Extra cooking wasn't going to hurt that sauce. But with the fresh tomatoes I wanted to try to preserve their flavor and not have them taste too stewed. Commercial canners can flash-boil them and the total processing time is super hot but very brief.

I'd been putting this off for years. I bought my pressure canner specifically for this sort of thing and have been assiduously avoiding it every since. There are only a few things you can safely process in a hot water bath, but these are also what I make the most of. We're talking high sugar things like jam and high acid tomatoes. If I were to make canned pumpkin pie filling, for instance, it would have to be pressure canned. It makes things insanely hot and crazy in there, but also shortens the cooking time exponentially. For instance, I could have boiled the tomatoes in there for an hour and a half, or I could do a mere 20 minutes at 11 pounds pressure.

11 pounds of terror

The pressure terrifies me. I can't stop looking at the pot like a big bomb sitting on the stove. And I have to be there the whole time to make sure the pressure is constant, so I can't get it going and hide. But I did it. I did the tomatoes, and everything worked out fine. Now we just have to see if they taste good. We go through a lot of big cans of tomatoes in this house when Charlie makes sauce.

marinara on the left, whole tomatoes on the right

Next up: blueberries. I am sporting a sunburn as I type, but that story will have to wait till tomorrow. My kitchen is beginning to look like an episode of Little House on the Prairie, and I'm exhausted.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 3
Eggs laid this year: 80