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torquillI finally bought a dunk pot today -- the kind with holes that fits in another pot, so that you can immerse and retrieve stuff you want to dunk in boiling water. Much better than fishing things out with a spider.
Anyway, $20 to Cash&Carry (and a lot of windowshopping) later, I brought it home and started dunking tomatoes in hot water.
Much is said in various publications about blanching tomatoes to make them easy to peel. Half the time I don't bother -- I just sit down with a paring knife and a movie and do it the usual way. I had a lot of small ones this time, though, so I figured hot water was the way to go.
As I say, lots of people have talked about how to do it. Here are my own notes:
1) The "cut a cross on the top" thing is crap unless you have round tomatoes. I grow beefsteaks, mostly, because of their size and flavor; the stem is actually much lower than the shoulders in most cases. Skip it.
2) Core and trim them first. It's really hard to core a tomato you can't get a grip on. Besides, the cut edges from coring work as an indicator of when they're done, since the "cut a cross" technique is fantasy.
3) I ran across a site that said "do six or fewer tomatoes per batch, to keep things easy to handle". Screw that -- the reason I don't blanch most of the time is I detest hovering over a boiling kettle of water, in a hot and steamy kitchen, for hours. I want to do huge batches, so that the majority of my time is spent over the sink, taking the skins off of cool tomatoes that have been in ice water.
4) Take any green shoulders or sunscald off first. I know, I know, the perfect people canning perfect tomatoes don't have these issues, but I live in the real world.
5) You can never have enough ice.
6) You can never have enough large bowls and/or pots. Really. Go buy a few of the enormous kiddie-pool-sized salad bowls at Target. I really should. (Edit: Better still, use that huge stockpot or even the canning kettle to hold the ice. To heck with bowls that tip over and hold only a handful of tomatoes -- pull out the 40-quart turned aluminum pot, or if that's not enough, the big polyethylene laundry tub with the rope handles. Cold things won't react with aluminum anyway. Think big.)
7) Water will get everywhere. I mean everywhere. I need to remember to keep a scrap towel on hand.
8) It doesn't take longer than about ten seconds. Look for the curling edges, count to three, and pull the whole thing.
9) Discovered when canning peaches: refrigerate the tomatoes or fruit first, overnight. If they're cold, they won't cook as badly when they get blanched, and they'll cool down in the ice faster.
I spent all afternoon and a good portion of the evening peeling and coring tomatoes. After all that, the tomatoes look fabulous. Whatever else might be said about Neves Azorean Red (I think the taste when fresh isn't much, but its other attributes are great) it has a blazing red color. I've also got eight pints of yellow and orange tomatoes, about the color of carrot juice, plus two pints of that juice to do weird things with.
I wasn't able to reach my mom tonight -- she'll be back in town tomorrow, but I had hoped to get our family recipe for ratatouille so that I could do a batch alongside the tomatoes -- but I threw the remaining tomatoes and the uncut veggies back into the fridge, to be dealt with in the next couple of days. It won't kill me to assemble the canning supplies again.
The bomb is depressurizing in the kitchen, and when I open it up, I'll have fourteen pints of chopped tomatoes, some in day-glo orange. Things are looking pretty good.
Oh, and Cash&Carry has a "Cheese/Jam dish" for $10 that would make a great salt cellar. I'll see whether I can get it as a household thing. It would sure beat having the sugar and salt containers look almost exactly the same...
Anyway, $20 to Cash&Carry (and a lot of windowshopping) later, I brought it home and started dunking tomatoes in hot water.
Much is said in various publications about blanching tomatoes to make them easy to peel. Half the time I don't bother -- I just sit down with a paring knife and a movie and do it the usual way. I had a lot of small ones this time, though, so I figured hot water was the way to go.
As I say, lots of people have talked about how to do it. Here are my own notes:
1) The "cut a cross on the top" thing is crap unless you have round tomatoes. I grow beefsteaks, mostly, because of their size and flavor; the stem is actually much lower than the shoulders in most cases. Skip it.
2) Core and trim them first. It's really hard to core a tomato you can't get a grip on. Besides, the cut edges from coring work as an indicator of when they're done, since the "cut a cross" technique is fantasy.
3) I ran across a site that said "do six or fewer tomatoes per batch, to keep things easy to handle". Screw that -- the reason I don't blanch most of the time is I detest hovering over a boiling kettle of water, in a hot and steamy kitchen, for hours. I want to do huge batches, so that the majority of my time is spent over the sink, taking the skins off of cool tomatoes that have been in ice water.
4) Take any green shoulders or sunscald off first. I know, I know, the perfect people canning perfect tomatoes don't have these issues, but I live in the real world.
5) You can never have enough ice.
6) You can never have enough large bowls and/or pots. Really. Go buy a few of the enormous kiddie-pool-sized salad bowls at Target. I really should. (Edit: Better still, use that huge stockpot or even the canning kettle to hold the ice. To heck with bowls that tip over and hold only a handful of tomatoes -- pull out the 40-quart turned aluminum pot, or if that's not enough, the big polyethylene laundry tub with the rope handles. Cold things won't react with aluminum anyway. Think big.)
7) Water will get everywhere. I mean everywhere. I need to remember to keep a scrap towel on hand.
8) It doesn't take longer than about ten seconds. Look for the curling edges, count to three, and pull the whole thing.
9) Discovered when canning peaches: refrigerate the tomatoes or fruit first, overnight. If they're cold, they won't cook as badly when they get blanched, and they'll cool down in the ice faster.
I spent all afternoon and a good portion of the evening peeling and coring tomatoes. After all that, the tomatoes look fabulous. Whatever else might be said about Neves Azorean Red (I think the taste when fresh isn't much, but its other attributes are great) it has a blazing red color. I've also got eight pints of yellow and orange tomatoes, about the color of carrot juice, plus two pints of that juice to do weird things with.
I wasn't able to reach my mom tonight -- she'll be back in town tomorrow, but I had hoped to get our family recipe for ratatouille so that I could do a batch alongside the tomatoes -- but I threw the remaining tomatoes and the uncut veggies back into the fridge, to be dealt with in the next couple of days. It won't kill me to assemble the canning supplies again.
The bomb is depressurizing in the kitchen, and when I open it up, I'll have fourteen pints of chopped tomatoes, some in day-glo orange. Things are looking pretty good.
Oh, and Cash&Carry has a "Cheese/Jam dish" for $10 that would make a great salt cellar. I'll see whether I can get it as a household thing. It would sure beat having the sugar and salt containers look almost exactly the same...
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 20:04 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 05:56 (UTC)Come to think of it, I'll have to alter the seasoning a bit anyway -- oregano can get very aggressive in a jar. At least now I know what I'll be changing...