Canning tomatoes is the height of the summer garden experience. But it can also be overwhelming when you’re faced with canning hundreds of pounds before they go bad!
Find out the easy trick for saving them so you are able to can them at your leisure!
This year our summer garden went completely crazy. I’m talking “locked up in a padded room in Lubbock” crazy.
That’s the “problem” with the Back to Eden gardening method… you get huge gorgeous plants and the most abundant garden you can imagine! Seriously, we had veggies coming out of our ears for MONTHS before the heat finally took everything out and we had a lull in the produce.
50+ pounds of cucumbers every day, 25-30 pounds of zucchini every day, 5 pounds of beans every day, 2-10 pounds of tomatoes EVERY DAY… you get the idea. Lots of produce!
It caught me completely off guard as I had no idea I would be spending 8-10 hours a day canning and processing food for 3 straight months.
I was emotionally and physically exhausted from the enormous effort that was involved in single-handedly processing over 1000 pounds of produce. As a result I tried to find all the shortcuts I could! One of the things I found that I could postpone until later, was canning tomatoes!
Canning Tomatoes Months After the Harvest
It is a surprisingly easy trick to store the gallons and gallons of tomatoes for later processing. It takes almost zero effort and is a great way to store indeterminate tomatoes until the end of the season so you can process them all at one.
All you have to do is freeze them! That’s right, you can just freeze the tomatoes whole in order to can them later with these 3 easy steps!
Step 1
Sort tomatoes for any cuts or bites and set them aside. Add any whole remaining tomatoes to a gallon freezer bag and seal once full.
Step 2
Freeze the tomatoes in a single layer of bags (don’t stack bags on top of each other) until they are all completely frozen (about 12 hours). Once the tomatoes are completely frozen you can place the bags anywhere they will fit, like I have them here.
Step 3
When you’re ready to process, place the tomatoes in warm water for 3-5 minutes. Pull skin towards the blossom end to remove.
Process the tomatoes as normal for whatever canning project you have in mind! Or you can turn them into fresh sauce right then.
You can see the full process in the short video below! I usually keep about 15-20 fresh tomatoes out each day for snacking and meals, and the rest go straight into freezer bags!
I ended up with 18 bags of cherry tomatoes this year from just 1 plant!
How to Use Canned Tomatoes
While there are lots of different ways to can tomatoes – pasta sauce, juice, salsa, and even tomato jam for example – we mostly just can a generic sauce so that it can be used for any number of things in post processing.
Here are a few of our favorite ways to use our canned tomato sauce:
One Pan Healthy Broccoli Casserole
Spaghetti Squash Casserole (perfect for freezing)
Pizza (just reduce the sauce and season!)
Chili (add water if it’s too thick)
And of course, pasta!!
But first, we have to actually can the sauce before we can use it in all these delicious recipes (and more)!
Canning Tomatoes as Sauce
Canning Tomatoes
Ingredients
- Tomatoes
- Bottled Lemon Juice
- Canning Jars pint or quart
Instructions
-
Heat oven to 250° and place clean canning jars into oven on a baking sheet.
-
Remove lemon juice from fridge and allow to warm to room temperature (if it's cold when starting out). This prevents the jars from breaking when you add the cold liquid to the hot jar.
-
Skin and de-seed tomatoes. This is easiest if they were frozen first!
-
Remove blossom end with a knife.
-
Place tomatoes in a large stock pot and bring to a boil.
-
Using an immersion blender (if available) blend tomatoes until smooth. If no immersion blender is available, use a regular blender or a food processor to blend tomatoes. Transfer back to the pot and bring to a low boil.
-
Remove jars from oven and add lemon juice to bottom of each jar. 1 tbsp per pint, 2 tbsp per quart.
-
Ladle in tomato sauce, leaving a 1/2" headspace.
-
Clean rims and secure lids and rings.
-
Follow canning instructions here and process for 95 minutes in a water bath canner.
-
Remove from canner and allow to cool for 24 hours before moving and storing.
Lisa S Lafogg says
August 28, 2018 at 7:55 pmwhy do you have to toss the cracked tomatoes? can you quarter the tomaties and freeze them? a lot of tomatoes crack depending on the growing season i dont throw them away unless they’ve molded.
Victoria says
August 28, 2018 at 9:46 pmHi Lisa! The comment about tossing split ones really only applies if you want to use the “pop it” method for peeling the tomatoes. We keep our split ones and eat them fresh. If you plan to just freeze and use the tomatoes (without peeling), then the split ones are fine to freeze too! Sorry about the confusion.
kim Bemis says
April 11, 2019 at 5:34 amI tried freezing tomatoes this past summer. They turned to mush after thawing.
Victoria says
April 11, 2019 at 10:40 pmHi Kim, yes, they do turn to mush after being frozen. You can pop the skins off of them as shown in the video, but yes, freezing tomatoes is for canning only. It doesn’t really work for eating them “fresh” :-)
Edie Carey says
May 8, 2019 at 2:10 pmCan you please tell me if I can use the canning citric acid with this method? When using it for fresh tomatoes, Ball Canning says 1/2 tsp citric acid in place of the lemon juice you call for. I don’t want to waster my tomatoes by using it if it won’t work, but I’d rather not have to buy anything else. Thank for your help. Your article is so easy to understand and follow that I am going to quit procrastinating and just do this!
Victoria says
May 8, 2019 at 2:28 pmHi Edie! Great question, yes you can use citric acid instead, I just prefer lemon juice. Either way works and should be tasty! I’m so glad you’re going to take the plunge and try it! :-)
Enjoy!
Mel says
May 13, 2019 at 4:25 amHow long are tomatoes good when frozen. It’s the start of the new gardening season & I still have tons of them frozen. My husband says they are all probably bad now but I honestly don’t know?
Victoria says
May 13, 2019 at 9:09 amThey are definitely fine! I just canned some a month ago that we’re from last summer and they were perfect!