Canning Tomato Sauce

This year at Oasis we planted four 75 foot rows of a variety of tomatoes. Berkeley tie dye an heirloom, Oregon Spring an open-pollinated Bush variety, a paste tomato and Coeur de bouaf, a French variety often called ox heart. Most of them are staked and trellised and I'm loving my new system which has the tomatoes well under control.

My new kitchen full of stainless steel sinks counters and a big 8 burner stove is able to handle three or four big pots all at once. One of them is 38 quarts and it's full of tomato right now.

The first pot of Berkeley tie dye is 38 quarts full to the very top and then stomped down once or twice to make them fit.  I used to make this first cook short so that I could strain them out and get more in the pot but now with the bigger pots it makes more sense to cook them longer with skins on. This should make the sauce richer and more flavorful as well as imbue it with more of the beneficial from the skins. Each of the varieties was quite different in cook time the longest being over three hours.  My method on sauce I call the slump test -- just take a couple of ounces and put it on a plate and see if the center pile holds up a bit and the edges don't just run watery.  

Straining is always the hard part because strainers that are available to me are all small kitchen varieties and we're too small and operation to get anything commercial. I'm leaning towards inventing some sort of Amish apparatus.  All total this batch I processed about 160 pound representing about 21 gallons of crush and netted 24 quarts of sauce.  About 6 hours turn around but worth it as the sauce is exceptionally tasty.

(This recipe did not strain off the water but rather cooked it off long and hard. As a result the sauce was very flavorful but the process grueling. More recent recipes cooked them only moderately and then let the tomato water drain and then process and then cook again.  The result is not as much taste and a sauce that is a bit thin.  A combination of methods may be optimal.  Alternatively I may slip the skins after a generous cook and then cook for as much as two more hours. This will call for a great deal of diligent pot scraping but in the end I can just process them with the emersion blender rather than straining which will leave the seeds in and result in more product per quart of fruit and taste as good as the first batch.)